Don't be surprised if in a year's time you end up getting that dedicated windows machine anyway. It's not only Windows software, but it's really desktop software. Not even good for laptops. It takes a *lot* of resources to run, all their products are going to look good, and all the databases and opening books you create on your own are going to take up a massive amount of space. Plus they have a way to install all three main tablebases -- Nalimov, Syzygy, and Gaviota, and if you install just the 3-4-5 then it's totally doable, but will still take up about 20 GB. If I had the funds, man, it would be top of the list of priorities.
Chessbase with Mac running on a virtual machine.
Sort:
Nov 22, 2022
0
#3
So you both are of the opinion that one should get a "dedicated windows machine" and by that you mean basically to just get a new laptop running the windows operating system?
Nov 22, 2022
0
#4
I wouldn't get a laptop, but a desktop. I wish it weren't true. No program should be so essential. But it never runs fast enough, and it always wants to take up more space.
For instance, say you have 10,000 games. Ideally you could run tactical analysis on all of them. If you wanted, you could just mine for novelties, which is one part of the analysis. The first process takes about two minutes per game, and the latter takes just a second per game (on this particular system). I mined for novelties yesterday on a database of 28,000 recent engine tournament games, and it took about 12 hours, which is already too long. By comparison, it takes about that long on my computer to run tactical analysis on 50 games. And this is just one thing you can do with the program.
Feb 20, 2024
0
#5
It is not true that you can run ChessBase only on a Desktop. I ran it for several years on a rather cheap laptop just optimized for RAM and processor speed and I had not problems. Used the latest Stockfish as engine. Sure, you don't get the speeds like on a 1000-core desktop, but if you are not at least an IM or define yourself by Nodes/seconds you are totally fine.
These days I run ChessBase on a Macbook with M3 - not a cheap thing - with Parallels (also an extra 120 bucks a year) and even an engine in the Windows environment (again, it's not a superfast setup but I get to depth 30 in less than 30 seconds). Everything works smoothly, and all is well-integrated into the Mac OS.
This is not a budget setup, but I don't need to cope with an ugly extra machine running an ugly OS just for ChessBase.
Hello. I'm interested in using chessbase on an intel macbook pro (2020). Does anyone have experience running chessbase using bootcamp or a VM on a mac? If so, how has your experience been? I'm not too jazzed about buying a dedicated windows machine just for chessbase, so I figured I'd field an inquiry. Your help and insight is very much appreciated. Thank you.