I currently have a 6GB database running on a dedicated 64 bit Athlon box with 2GB RAM.The database structure is 23 tables, 4 of which are over 1GB each. The database doesn't change and is not performing any transactional tasks, hence MyISAM instead of InnoDB. The database is still not running as fast as I would like.

Current set up:
query_cache_size=176M
table_cache=1520
tmp_table_size=63M
thread_cache=38
myisam_max_sort_file_size=100G
myisam_max_extra_sort_file_size=10* 0G
myisam_sort_buffer_size=63M
key_buffer_size=547M
read_buffer_size=64K
read_rnd_buffer_size=256K
sort_buffer_size=256K