[Chimera-users] Laptop to run Chimera

[Tom Goddard]

Hi David,

  Any newish laptop will run Chimera fine.  The main problem is with 5+ year old laptops where Windows no longer supports the graphics, so you update to Windows 10 and it falls back to an inadequate generic graphics driver that only supports the 1997 OpenGL 3d graphics standard.  Even with that Chimera still works, but some important feature like selecting atoms with the mouse don’t work.  If you work on very large molecules, like 100,000 atom ribosome structures then it is desirable to have an Nvidia or AMD graphics chip in the laptop rather than the slower Intel graphics that is in less expensive machines.  For the very large structures you should also have more memory, 8 Gbytes say, to get faster speeds.  If you work with very large density maps, say 1 Gbyte in size, then a solid-state disk drive is nice since it reads them faster, a few seconds instead of 10 seconds.  Few people look at the very big data, so really any modern laptop will do.  Whether to go with Mac or Windows is a matter of personal preference and I wouldn’t let Chimera decide that issue — Chimera will work fine on both.

	Tom


> On Oct 1, 2016, at 2:40 PM, Christianson, David T wrote:
> 
> Good afternoon,
> 
> I would like to purchase a laptop for Chimera use, I am open to either an Apple or Windows based computer. Might any of you have a model that you would suggest?
> Thanks very much for your time,
> 
> Dave
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