On my Pentium 3-800MHz rig with 128MB of memory, I could use Michael 2 and Anton's beard without difficulty. Adding more props and figures would be problematic due to my lack of RAM, but the beard itself doesn't seem to be a resource hog. Render time for each of the images above (with default lighting at 400x300) was less than 45 seconds with shadows, bump maps, textures, and antialiasing enabled. The close-up image took the longest, of course.