I have a question 4 u:
I posted a similar question on few forums (maybe on this, i can't remember), but nobody gave me a useful answer.
My problem is that i'm not pretty sure that my machine uses best performances when i'm working in maya. I have installed maya 2014, tried to set stuff correctly, but something's not good.
I have hp z400, with 12 gigs of ram and quadro 2000. When maya render (with mental ray) a still frame (not some hard core scene with billions of polygons) a scene with 2-3 lights, shadows and objects with, at all, 3000-4000 polys, it took about 5 minutes. When i'm rendering some animations, it's even worse. Ok, it depends of many things, but on my old machine, which was not nothing special, i thing, it was faster
My first test (when i bought hp, 2 years ago) was with a big scene, that i made on the other cpu (which was made for AVID, not for 3d). On avid machine it takes about 20 minutes to finalize a render (maya software), and on my hp it takes about 2 minutes. I was very surprised with the result. But i'm talking about still frame and that scene. After that things went wrong.
I was trying to set a multythread, max memory usage and other stuff, but when batch renders stars, i look at task manager it shows that maya is using only 2-3 gigs of ram, and cpu usage is something very poor and small. Like it uses only one core of four.
Anyone knows some tricks or what's the problem or... ?
thanks guys!
i'll try that. maybe that's the reason ?! cause I found some stupidities in maya settings, and who knows maybe that will solve my problem 
