I have a fairly powerful system (2.8Ghz Intel Pentium Dual Core, eVGA 8800 GTS Superclocked, 2GB DDR2 Crucial RAM) but when i turn on the mode to render polygons as flat surfaces (by pressing 5) in Maya 8.5 Personal Learning Edition it slows down to a practical crawl. As i recall, it ran faster on some dinky old Compaq laptop with an integrated graphics card (in that mode of course)!
(would add "maya" tag but don't have enough rep)
Well I'm not sure if it will solve your problem but there is a problem that maya has with dual monitor setup. I've found that a number of options in nvdia drivers have to be set properly to have decent maya performance (the major slowdowns occure if you have shaded view with wireframe visible like selecting an object for example). In my case setting dual monitor setup to horizontal span (skip if you have a single monitor), set acceleration to single scree, and disable threading. All of these options can be found in advanced section of nvidia display driver. hope it helps
Perhaps you could upgrade your videocard since that will most likely be used most for this kind of work
I'm not sure if Maya has a CUDA plugin, but that (theoretically) should speed up the program a lot for such kind of tasks.