Blender Rendered

Recently my son and I began working on a short movie for fun.  We wanted to use mostly rendered environments and green screen the characters in.  After designing the first world, we had a problem.  My Intel i7 was taking 9 hours per frame to render in Blender's Cycles.  This would make a few minute movie impossible.  I purchased a Nvidia GTX 750ti SC for around $130 from Amazon.  This card rated highest value for dollar over at Passmark.  

For use in Cycles the card must support CUDA 2+.  To be usable the card needs around 2 gb of RAM.  Even with 2 gb on my card I ran out of RAM with particle scenes.  How did the card perform?

CPU, i7 quad core 920 @ 2.66 ghz with 8 gb RAM

9 hrs 45 min

GPU, Nvidia 750ti SC 2gb DDR5

5 min 45 sec

The results?