Just one thing -- while your computer rocks... the videocard means nothing in Maya Software/Mental Ray.

I'm actually wishing they used the GPU in MentalRay/Software optionally to make use of ShaderModel3; they could gain a near 10-fold increase in speed offloading certain processes. It won't give a 10-fold increase in speed, but even if one of every three processes can be done on the GPU -- that's ~3x speed.