Quote - It probably depends on several things.  I run cloth simulations with clothing that have over 30k polys and have very little problems with it. A bit slower, but not 20-30 minutes unless it's a very long animation, then it can take quite a while. And I have slower processor than you. 

I think BB already mentioned somewhere that the cloth engine doesn't take advantage of multiple cores?

One thing you can do is to check that your cloth is not set to collide with unecessary things (like feet for a shirt etc), and other objects in the scene, like hair, jewelry etc that are not needed.

Also check how the character goes from start/zero pose to final frame. Make sure the anim graph doesn't have crazy splines between the poses. Also, check that your character is taking the optimum path. Some poses I've seen have the body or hip rotated 355 degrees instead of -5, which is hardly efficient for cloth simulations. :)

You can also pre drape the cloth, if it has a lot of fabric that needs to settle. (Like wide skirts or fluffy clothes in general) Pre-drape it to your zero pose, let the fabric settle, then just export the obj, import it again and run the simulation. You may have to set constrained, decorated groups again.

But... 5k polygons shouldn't have to take very long, so something else may be wrong.  People here love screenshots, so don't hesitate posting them and describing them!

 

 

Sorry to bail on my own post guys, I've been too busy and actually forgot about it.  I didn't know about dynamics not using multiple cores, but I'm not surprised.  I have it running at 4 ghz anyway.  I have problems fitting the clothes, actually, since I like to stray from the out-of-the-box characters.  What I do is zero the figure at frame one, have it restored at frame 20, and run the simulation to 20 with the entire dynamic mesh constrained.  I spawn a new morph target, then clear the sim and run it again without being constrained to eliminate where the cloth "sticks" to the figure.  I'm thinking maybe using the morph target is somehow complicating the calculations.  Now this isn't the ONLY time I have problems, just brainstorming.  And when I run cloth sims on an actor of a comforming item, like the hip of a skirt, it works perfectly fast, so I don't know what's going on.