Does Parallels require a more powerful iMac configuration?

[GlenSydney]

Hi

I'm thinking of buying my first Mac and putting Parallels on it to run Windows and Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook only).

If I do buy, it would be a 27 inch iMac off the shelf, with the following standard configuration:

27-inch: 3.4GHz
Specifications

3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i5
Turbo Boost "up to 3.8GHz"
8GB (two 4GB) memory
1TB hard drive1
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M with 2GB video memory

Would that be sufficient to run Parallels,Windows and Office without any noticeable slow down or do I need to increase the spec in some way ?

Thank you for your assistance.

 

[xinaes]

If you're still interested:

If you can configure an SSD that would likely help a lot (I wish it was easier to add this as an upgrade), also more memory never hurts but that should be easy enough to add later at non-Apple prices if needed. Mavericks seems to do quite well with RAM management anyway. I upgraded my 2011 iMac RAM to 16GB and haven't noticed all that much difference really. The bottleneck is very much the HDD as far as I can tell.

I don't know what the Fusion drive option is like, but not having any kind of SSD is a real shame on an expensive modern system. It'd run ok, but there will definitely be times you notice it being slow if it doesn't have an SSD.