Computer restarts while working in 3D

[Jan Vlach]

First general information: I am working on my diploma thesis - an urban development project - so far I have modeled terrain consisting of about 45000 polygons (according to polycount add-on). The terrain is modeled from slabs using a magic wand to trace contour lines. The area displayed is about 4x1.5 km large but without much other detail. This terrain is saved as a single *gsm file for easier handling as I do not plan on altering it. On top of this another roughly 6000 polys are slab extrusions of building perimeters (simple shapes, no element operations roofs or anything other fancy) Now I am in process of assigning them their propper height switching between measurements in Google earth pro and archicad.

Now the issue: While working in 3D the the computer restarts itself. No BSOD or any warning, just restart. I tried to keep an eye on my temperatures and system load while working and while I get decent memory load (about 3/4) the CPU temps are under 40C° at about ten pecrent load and GPU is at about 60C°. I suspected a GPU or power supply related issue as once I got graphic artifacts in POST after one of those restarts. However I tried to run Furmark (1.17) and the system handles it - at mere 10 FPS under full load and max temps 58C° but stable so I am not sure if the gpu is to blame.
The archicad file on its own is about 90 MB and 52000 polygons so nothing extravagant. I myself have handled larger files (200mb) on this computer albeit not this large in in terms of physical space - 4 km in lenght.

As for the computer:
I am running Phenom X6 1090t (not overclocked)
250 GB Patriot SSD
8 GB of DDR 2 (I know, but the memory really doesnt seem to be bottleneck here)
and Radeon 4850 with 512 MB of Ram (I know but I only have four textures loaded in the model, two of whom are only an RGB color)
The power supply is 450W Corsair unit with 80+ silver - abut what is recommended for this config.

I suppose that the graphic will have to go, probably with the power supply, but I wonder whether it will help or if there may be another issue (perhaps the shire size of space displayed or drivers - my computer wont accept anything newer than some aging 8. something catalyst) that I am overlooking.
Anyway thanks for reading thus far and If you have anything to add to his topic, please do. Thanks:)

[Erwin Edel]

Are you modelling far away from the origin (0,0)?

Also consider that the magic wanded terrain might have a lot of short segments to make up a curve, that can be simplified by drawing the actual curve.

Consider scaling the entire model. Calculations are still done with large numbers.

[Jan Vlach]

Hi Erwin, thanks for reply. I am working with the orgin in middle of my terrain, to avoid problem with this issue. As for the terrain: I did not make it with a Mesh tool as I am not particularly fond of how messy it looks in axo and sections, so instead the terrain is made by slabs (looks like steps, quite cool actually) To avoid unnecessary points on the lines I have redrawn the countours prior to extruding them with magic wand. To avoid much calculations with the large terrain I decided to save it as a library part, expecting it to be more efficcient as such (and not be counted as a volume). Now as I thing about your last point, I do have some quantity tables in that archicad file, that I will not need for the project so I just try to delete them, perhaps that will also contribute to better results. However as for now I want to keep using the actuall project size, as it has other benefits.

I will also reluctantly upgrade my graphics (I am looking at 1050Ti) and power supply just to keep peace of mind.

[Erwin Edel]

By calculations I mean the calculations ArchiCAD does to display your model.

For most likely the same reason any city planning maps and such you download (at least in NL) are drafted in meters (1 drawing unit = 1 meter). Scale down your model from mm to m, to see if that helps.

I'm not aware of any benefits to converting to object for displaying things faster in 3D, but maybe someone else can confirm this. In floorplan it helps if you make a simplified 2D symbol.

The stacked slabs do have more surfaces than a mesh would, even though you do not see them. You could try converting them to a morph and merging it to one morph.

I would indeed upgrade GPU and PSU, though there might still be other hardware failing, but a failing GPU could result in random reboots.

[Ralph Wessel]

This sounds symptomatic of a hardware failure, e.g. RAM. This can be hard to pin down, but RAM failures, or example, are more likely to cause a freeze/reboot when the machine is under load. You might want to use diagnostic software that will push the RAM etc in a systematic way to try to pinpoint the source of a problem.

[Jan Vlach]

Well an graphics upgrade seems to have done the trick and now even with three imported sketchup models Archicad runs just fine and so far stable. Thanks for reactions Ralph and Tom.