jahydock is right. I did a bit of research... but the ram does help, as it stores the already rendered data during rendering. (henceforth the image size thing). Now, I have a

Pentium 4 with HT, 3.2 ghz processor. But as I said...

your render setup is different from mine. Not that mine cannot be optimized: I rendered one yesterday and it looks exactly the same, but it took only about 40 mins to render.