Unusually slow Rendering times....
 

I've got a pretty good setup (imho), but I'm experiencing some really slow render times. I'm working on a scene with a little less than 124,000 tris, and it is taking at least 7 minutes to render a high quality frame. I have ray tracing turned on, but I still think that is too much. To render 1270 frames of this scene, it took approx. 108 hours. My system is:

Dual 3.4GHz Xeon Processors, 800MHz FSB
3GB DDR2 PC3200 RAM
nVidia Quadro FX4500 PCI-E 512MB Video Card
(2)500GB HDDs, in RAID 1
Windows XP Pro w/SP2

If these times seem about right, then please excuse my post. But, if anyone has some helpful insight on how I can speed things up, please let me know. Both CPUs are working, staying between 90-100% most of the time, so what else could it be? Any help will be greatly appreciated!

I would say these are not slow. What are you rendering with?

Mental Ray/Maya Software/finalRender/Renderman

Each render engine will take less or more time to render the same scene due to the way it deals with each rendering effect (Caustics, Photons etc...).

Are you using Global Illumination or Final Gather as these will increase render times also.

I'm just using Maya Software. I tried Mental Ray, but the results weren't good at all. And, forgive me for my lack of knowledge, but I'm not sure what Global Illumination or Final Gather are. Can you please explain?

Thanks, in advance!