Have you not worked with 3d Studio Max and Mental Ray yet? Mental Ray is the shizzle...And as for faster computer...I dunno..I'm running a dual core amd opteron 2214 processor with 4 gigs of Ram running windows xp64 and the 64 bit version of 3ds max...My vid card is a 1700 dollar quadro FX 4500...pre-loaded software included this machine cost you 12,000 dollars. (tax dollars).
Its the global illumination, area lighting, 8+ bounce raytracing, internal illumination on the stone, caustic lighting (render time killer), texture blending and edge rounding (shader effect), and scene glare (specular bloom) that drive the render times up...