On 06/21/2011 11:44 AM, Ryan Woltz wrote:

Dear Chimera,

We are looking at getting a new computer for our lab to used for only modeling. We are planning using chimera, pymol, and dock 6.4 as primary programs for this. What specifications i.e. graphic cards, ram, do you recommend us getting?

Thank you,

Ryan Woltz UC Davis Cardiology

It depends on how big your data is, how you want to visualize it, and your budget. All of the programs would benefit from faster CPUs and more RAM, and the visualization programs benefit from faster graphics. Dock can run in parallel, so the more CPUs the better. Chimera gets more benefit from faster individual CPUs, but is starting to use some parallelized code. Don't know about pymol. So, if you can do your docking on a computational cluster, then I'd suggest just getting a quad-core computer. Take a look at the chimera benchmark results, http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/wiki/benchmarks, for an idea of the relative performance of graphics cards. The benchmark results are submitted by chimera users (using Tools / Utilities / Benchmark, please submit your results too), so the coverage of graphics cards is spotty. Another good source of relative graphics card performance is Tom's Hardware's, http://www.tomshardware.com/, "Best Graphics Cards For the Money" articles. The last page has a "Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart" -- note that the best performing cards are the most power hungry and the hottest. If you want to display 3D stereo graphics with chimera, you'll need a workstation graphics card, a NVidia Quadro or AMD/ATI FirePro, instead of a consumer card (AMD/ATI Radeon, NVIDIA GeForce) and a suitable display. Stay away from Intel integrated graphics. Graphics on Linux is typically slightly faster with identical hardware than Apple Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, but that should not be a major consideration. HTH, Greg