just a thought... before reeling in new HW and SW and tossing existing stuff out of the window...

 - what's the size of your Poser file compressed / uncompressed
So we can compare, I'm running win7pro 64 and Poserpro2014 as well

 - how many texture files are you using, at what size?
I think this is the one. All files have to be imported and converted to HDR (exr) format into your texture cache. Try menu Render > Reload Textures and see what happens. Does it take that long too?

 - is your Texture Cache big enough (general prefs). If not, than only a limited portion of your textures survives between Poser sessions, and all the other ones have to be reloaded. The default 500MB will probably not be enough - I had scenes requiring 10Gb or so.
Just load the scene, then see what's in your %temp%PoserPro10PoserTextureCache

 - check your user-mem usage, in Taskmanager (Processes), especially when rendering. Do render as a separate process anyway.

food for thought: when you need 10GB for textures and you've got 8Gb ram, I guess something gets slowed down somewhere.

I do think polycount hardly matters. Andy2 is 20k verts and requires 10Mb in the scene. Complex hires chess piece: 15k verts. Growing hair on Andys head with 1 hair per cm2: 170k verts.

textures do matter, 1500x1500 exr file: 10MB. So each 4000x4000 map will do about 90-100MB.

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though