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:war...@delsci.com > -----Original Message----- > From: pymol-users-ad...@lists.sourceforge.net > [mailto:pymol-users-ad...@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of > Luca Fenu > Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 10:25 AM > To: pymol-users@lists.sourceforge.net > 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'? > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration > Strategies from IBM. Find simple to follow Roadmaps, > straightforward articles, informative Webcasts and more! Get > everything you need to get up to speed, fast. > http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7477&alloc_id=16492&op=click > _______________________________________________ > PyMOL-users mailing list > PyMOL-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pymol-users >
