I rendered the scene that BB linked to above, and I got surprising results when increasing the bucket size above the 64 used in the scene (times with textures loaded in PP2012):

Size     Time Seconds

64          38.1

256        39.6

1024      40.5

With a 1024 bucket size, total RAM usage was a bit over 4GB; I have 16, so no issue there.

This is a simple scene with no scattering, raytracing nor IDL, so perhaps larger buckets would increase performance in more complex scenes...

 

EDIT regarding RAM capacity in a sub-$1k machine, many ASROCK MBs will accomodate 32GB; mine will(although I'm only using 16).  I built it last fall for $760, including Windows 7 Pro....

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