ArchiCAD doesn't stress the rig

[Anonymous]

Hello guys!

I'm here on behalf of my sister. I'm myself a PC enthusiast and don't know that much about workstations. My sister used to have an Intel Core2Quad Q9550 and 4 GB of DDR3-1600 MHz (no ECC) on an common Asus P5Q3 board.

When I finished my build a few months back we decided that we'd switch and I would give her my old gaming rig and she'd pay it off in time. However it seems to not have worked out the way we had wished.

She's using now an Asus Rampage III Extreme motherboard with a Intel Core i7 980X, 12 GB of Corsair Dominator GT 1866 MHz memory, a Crosair Force F80 SSD and 3x EVGA GTX480 SCs with a GTX460 for PhysX.

There are no problems with the cooling since all parts are well cooled with water or air.

In order for her to give her the option of using her 3 displays SLI is off and she's got the option of activating it. Also she's got the option of going Surround.

Obviously she's got a professional workstation at work. With a Core i7 Xeon, 6 GB of DDR3-1066 ECC memory and a professional ATI FireGL card.
Nothing spectacular, but according to her, her PC at work is faster.

This came as a big surprise to me, since I figured that her workstation at work would be way more stable but slower. After all this rig I had was pretty spectacular with it's benchmark results considering I overclocked the Core i7 980X to 4.4 GHz.

It is quite obvious that something isn't right. After watching the TaskManager of Windows 7 64bit Ultimate (same OS at work) i noticed that the GPUs and CPU is pretty much idle even while rendering. Only one of the 12 threads is under load.

No matter what I did so far I couldn't manage to get the ArchiCAD versions of her's (9, 10, 11 and 14) to use the full potential of her new rig.

Now I'm hoping for help here. What kind of a system does she need to take best usage of ArchiCAD? I know MacOS would be better than Windows, but this cannot be used because she's using a couple other programs on daily bases which are limited to Windows.

I have two other rigs. My current gaming rig is a Core i7 2600k @ 4.8 GHz on a MSI P67-GD65 (B3) motherboard, 4 GB of DDR3-1600 MHz and a OCZ RevoDrive X2 240 GB SSD and I have a dedicated folding farm with an Asus KGPE-D16 motherboard, 16GB of DDR3-1333 ECC memory and 2x Opteron 6128 CPUs.

I wanna find out how I could possibly manufacture a rig out of those rigs we have to make ArchiCAD use the full potential of the hardware installed.

Can any of you guys give me any pointers what so ever to do? Is ArchiCAD limited to Xeon and Opteron CPUs to support multiple threads? Are the GTX480s limiting the software? What can be done within Windows 7 to make it better supported? Are there any patches or hacked drivers or something else we could use to gain performance?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards
Michael

[Karl Ottenstein]

Seems like a lot of words to just ask why ArchiCAD does not utilize all cores?

There are only a few places in AC that are heavily multithreaded. The majority of the time, things are single threaded.

If you do not see lots of cores active during a rendering, it is due to the rendering settings. This topic (single vs multi core rendering settings) is discussed in various other topics.

[Dwight]

Your single biggest gain in rendering performance is to move to Artlantis with all cores employed. It is fast AND good in the corners, too.

[Anonymous]

so what do you guys suggest we should do? What PC or workstation would suit best for ArchiCAD

[Erich]

Perhaps this helps you:

Dream Machine

[Anonymous]

I have made a videotutorial explain how to gain a lot of speed in Archicad, but it is in Spanish. It consists in make a virtual drive and move libraries and tempo folder to it. I think that sure it is explain here in the forum in english...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZoj2K50C40

[Anonymous]

Ok. Thanks. According to the video she'd be better off with the Core i7 2600k @ 4.7 GHz and 8 GB of memory and a cheap Quadro card than the system she has right now. The OCZ RevoDrive x2 240GB SSD will help too.

I guess we will be switching rigs again.

The video really helped me out thanks...