Hmmmm, I mostly agree with you, Benjamin.

But disagree on a couple of minor points. First, his scene is heavy on water and sky. Almost all of the compute time and a good share of temp storage space probably is devoted to rendering the sky and sea. About twice the amount of RAM would certainly help shorten the rendering times for anyone who has a lot of water in a scene, or a lot of water and sky. As you say, his video card is not the problem (changing that out would make no significant difference). In theory, he has a decent enough CPU, but my personal opinion is that his motherboard is not wonderfully fast, so he could purchase replace his motherboard with a gamer-type board from Asus, MSI or Gigabyte (finding the board that is compatible with his existing CPU). Replacing the motherboard probably would entail also putting new RAM (compatible with the motherboard) in it, but he needs more RAM anyhow. And, then anyone rendering an animation in Vue should be rendering to individually saved frames and then using one of the many available applications that compile individual frames into an animation. (Some of these are free, and pretty good applications.) I don't do tons of animations in Vue, but some...  Personally, I've found that a motherboard that supports SATA 3.0 (6Gbs transfer speed) and that is rendering to a solid state drive to have boosted my rendering speeds noticably. (In my case, I built a MSI board with the Samsung EVO Solid State Drives for both the C: and the D: drives. I render out to the :D drive, but I suspect that some of the increased speed is due to having all drives on this particular machine be solid state.)