Ihave a similar problem. I have an athlon 64 fx-55 processor, an asus a8v motherboard, an ati radeon 9800 card, and 1.5 ram. One would asume this would be great for a pretty decent speed, but sometimes I am doing simple low poly tasks and it's slow as hell.
Specially whenI try rendering using maya hardware which is supposed to be the fastest since it's using the processor's power and that takes ten times longer than using maya software.

Has any one encountered problems with asus a8v dlx motherboards and the athlon 64 fx-55 processors? I am pissed off i spent my whole income tax check to get a good system to run maya on and I have encountered lots of problems with it.