If you want to take some of the stress off your CPU "bake" the physics onto your text objects before you do any rendering. Run your animation to frame 180 in the Assembly room. All the calculations will be done. Change the motion for each object from physics to explicit. This will set up keys for all the motion and the down force can be deleted. CPU will just have to take care of the lighting/texturing at render time. Don't know if it will solve your problem but it should get to the freeze point alot faster. mdc