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Mischa, Though the FX4500 is expensive, it is (unfortunately) the only option for hardware stereo 3D. And with that card, I can personally attest to the fact that it is possible to have a 30" LCD and a ~22" stereo-capable CRT running simultaneously off of a single Mac Pro system. Thus, you can get the best of both worlds -- indeed, it is possible to direct MacPyMOL to open up in stereo 3D mode on the second display while still making simultaneous full use of the primary LCD for your other 2D work. Hopefully the same will prove true for Coot and O. Fantastic! Though I haven't had time yet to thoroughly benchmark the Octacore (having just opened the box 24 hours ago), I have run some head-to-head comparisons versus a dual-core 2 Ghz Opteron, and the initial results were staggering: PyMOL rendered a set of complex scenes nearly 7X faster on the Octacore Xeon than the dual-core Opteron. That is almost exactly what one would expect from clockspeed alone: 8x3 = 24 gHz of Xeon versus 2x2 = 4 gHz of Opteron. Honestly, that seems too good to believe, and yet I have not yet found a problem with those measurements. Though I can't speak to the other packages, PyMOL already supports multithreaded rendering and parallel geometry construction for multistate objects (trajectories) and/or scenes with multiple independent objects. In other words, if you have the cores to space, PyMOL can make use of them and will do so increasingly over the next couple of years as we add more parallelism into the code. For PyMOL rendering, eight cores cuts your wait time nearly in half (relative to four cores). Cheers, Warren -----Original Message----- From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mischa Machius Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 10:33 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [ccp4bb] Mac Pro questions Y'all - We are currently contemplating the purchase of a couple of Mac Pros. Apple has three graphics cards available. Initially, I was leaning towards the ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB, but read a lot of horror stories about that card overheating when taxed. I was wondering if anyone had such a setup and how it fares regarding general crystallographic work, i.e., running Coot, O, Pymol, etc. Would the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT be a better choice? I don't think we'll be going for the NVIDIA Quattro FX 4500. Also, I would appreciate it very much if anyone is willing to share their experience with other graphics cards, or to discuss whether it is worth getting an 8-core machine as opposed to a 4-core. Thanks so much. Best - MM ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- Mischa Machius, PhD Associate Professor UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas 5323 Harry Hines Blvd.; ND10.214A Dallas, TX 75390-8816; U.S.A. Tel: +1 214 645 6381 Fax: +1 214 645 6353