i'm a newbie and just got the aprentace version and wondered if there is a faster renderer because i got some samples and it goes SO slow while rendering… thanks in advance

mental ray should be okay or renderman if you can get it going, what software are you used to? cause houdini pretty good compared to most of the others.

i'm used to using pov ray to render

What are you rendering?
Its a fact that mantra is very fast and high quality when you compare it to other high-end renderers like PRman and mental ray.