well, as soon as I enable Light Tracer as the advanced rendering option, that boosts render times all the way up to about 4-6 minutes for a simple scene like this
...
I also use 3dsmax 7 at home, and the mental ray version I've got sorta sucks, to put it lightly.
I was thinking something like a Boxxtech's 8400 SE...
DUAL XEON X5482 3.2GHz, 12MB cache, 1600 MHz FSB (Quad-Core)
8GB FBDIMM DDR2 800 REG ECC
Autodesk 3D Studio Max 2008 Standalone
seems like it would be quite an awesome machine to work on.
Right now I'm using a Pentium 4 at 2.4Ghz, and I have 512Mb of ram... and 3dsmax 7, as mentioned earlier.
the machine I watched at the Autodesk 2008 Launch Tour had vastly similar specs to the dual quadcore I'd mentioned, and it could render in a couple seconds what takes my machine about 1:15 to render (a 640x480 scene with a couple boxes and other primitives, solid material, in mental ray, with Global Illumination and Final Gather enabled, changed to "Preview" Quality, all other settings left at default.)