I just got 512mb of RAM giving me a gigabyte so I can render high quality stuff faster. I'm also going to borrow a wacom pad from my art teacher and make some stuff in corel painter 9, which is an amazing program by the way.
If you want faster renders, you need a good FPU [link] Makes me think... I should benchmark my UltraSPARC, I'll let you know how it does... might not get to it really soon though