RE: [PyMOL] Pymol on MacMini: performances

[Warren D. <wa...@de...>]

Luca,

We bought a Mini here in the office to use as an inexpensive, secure,
stable, & hassle-free CVS server.  I hadn't tried running PyMOL on it until
today...

In a very small set of tests with surfaces, a $600 1.42 Ghz G4 Mini (ATI)
has about 25% of the OpenGL performace and 60% of the ray-tracing
performance of a $1800 1.8 Ghz iMac G5 (nVidia).  For comparison, a $450
eMachines 2.8 Ghz Celeron (Intel Graphics) has about 80% of the OpenGL
performace and 40% of the ray-tracing performance of the iMac.

In other words, the Mini's CPU performance is great; the graphics
performance isn't.  However, if you just stick to displaying lines, then the
Mini does very well -- as good as the iMac.  You can display transparent
surfaces of active sites just fine, but complete protein surfaces will seem
rather slow.

512 MB RAM is a minimum recommendation for ray-tracing with PyMOL. 784MB or
1GB is better.

Cheers,
Warren

--
Warren L. DeLano, Ph.D.                     
Principal Scientist

. DeLano Scientific LLC  
. 400 Oyster Point Blvd., Suite 213           
. South San Francisco, CA 94080 USA   
. Biz:(650)-872-0942  Tech:(650)-872-0834     
. Fax:(650)-872-0273  Cell:(650)-346-1154
. mailto:wa...@de...      
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pym...@li... 
> [mailto:pym...@li...] On Behalf Of 
> Luca Fenu
> Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 10:25 AM
> To: pym...@li...
> Subject: [PyMOL] Pymol on MacMini: performances
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm thinking of buying a Mac mini to use as minimal computer 
> for home, and will need it to run pymol smoothly. is this the 
> case, or the little machine doesn't have enough juice to 
> handle, let's say, visualisation of a protein active site and 
> ligand docked into it, with different level of transparence 
> and such? I need pymol essentially to look at my structure 
> and generate pretty pictures for my phD thesis... many thanks 
> to anyone can give insights...
> 
>     luca
> --
> S for stupendous! T for Tiger, ferocity of! U for Underwear, 
> red! P for Power, incredible! E for Excellent physique! N for 
> ...um... something... 
> hmm, well I'll come back to that... D for Determination! U.. for... 
> wait, how do you spell this? Is it 'I'?
> 
> 
> 
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