Concerns about Rendering speed in AE7 in General - Your opinion please..

Hi All,

I should really have posted this in the AE forum, but as I religiously visit this forum daily, I rather prefer to consult you guys.
I have a P4 3.2G machine with 2GB RAM running Windows XP Pro. Plenty of HD space over 300 GB on several partitions
I am using AE7 Pro.
My fundamental question is the following:

Does it really have to always take ages to render animations?

As a basic test:

I created a new project,
created a 5 seconds comp PAL D1/DV, Full resolution
added the Red Speed FFx Preset via Adobe Bridge i.e. File> Browse.

Hit RAM preview and it took 53 sec to render this 5 secs project, although, Under Edit > Preferences > Memory and Cache I set:
The Maximum Memory Usage to 120% of 2GB
Maximum Ram Cashe size to 70% = 1.4 GB
Maximum Disk Cache Size to 2 GB on another partition.

Imagine creating a 30 secs project at this rate!

Is this normal?

Thanks for your feedback..

Regards

Max