VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2008 - 11:24:47 CDT

Hi,
  Given that you're running Linux, NVIDIA cards are the best choice,
based on past experiences of the VMD user community.

The FX 1700 you asked about is a lower end (performance-wise)
card, so I'd suggest going for something better.

If you need to be able to do stereoscopic display
(e.g. with a CRT or another stereo-capable device),
then a Quadro FX 3700 cards is a good choice.

If you don't have any plans for stereoscopic display, then I would
instead suggest you buy a GeForce GTX 280 or GeForce GTX 260,
which are the latest generation of NVIDIA cards.
They support CUDA, and are the first generation of NVIDIA GPUs with
double precision arithmetic.

If you would like to be able to use the GPU for both computation
and for graphics, I'd suggest making sure that you get a GPU
with at least 1GB of memory.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 02:32:03PM +0200, Burcin Temel wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I would like to set up a new linux computer (Intel Core duo processor,
> 2.66Gz/1333MHz/4MB L2, memory: 4GB, 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC-4
> DIMMS) with a "512 MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX1700, Dual Monitor DVI
> capable" video card. Do you think this is good enough to animate
> surface dynamics movies, or doing contour plots of charge
> densities...? Or have you heard any problems with this kind of a video
> card so far? We need something that is capable of producing high
> quality graphics fast. I will be happy to hear your comments...
>
> Best regards,
>
> Burcin Temel. 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078