On Fri, 9 Nov 2007, Sandra Eriksson wrote:
Hi! I'm planning to buy a computer, and am checking on the requirements of my favourite programs. But, searching the Chimera home page, I found little information on the hardware neccessary to make the program run really smoothly. If you have suggestions for RAM, processor and graphics etc, I would be very grateful. Best, /Sandra
Hi Sandra, The answer to your question depends on how big the data is and what type of data you want to visualize. You can get idea of what you need by examining the chimera benchmarks results at <http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/benchmarks.html>. And when you get your new computer, please submit your benchmark results, so they stay somehwat current. Some general advice: (1) stay away from integrated/motherboard graphics and business graphics cards (eg., Quadro NVS), so get a gaming or workstation graphics card; (2) stick and ball&stick depictions are CPU limited, so get a fast CPU, (3) wire depiction is faster on workstation graphics cards; (4) more memory never hurts; (5) graphics drivers are still faster on Windows XP than Vista on the same hardware; (6) chimera doesn't care if you run Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux :-). Hope that helps, Greg Couch UCSF Computer Graphics Lab