If you had a few bucks to throw around to build a small renderfarm, what hardware would you buy? Rendering in Poser and Vue mainly...nothing like max or lw. total price is a BIG issue, but I'm thinking you could build a system just for rendering that wouldn't have to be all that powerful in some areas. what would be recommended: Processor, Motherboard Ram ... how much? Hard Drive ???? I would think this does not to be all that big video card? unimportant ???? could you use one of those $39 older gforce or ati cards? The fact rendering would be spread over several systems, how powerful would they have to be? Of course, as powerful as possible, is probably the answer, but cash is limited, so as cheap as possible , but the most BANG for the buck....

I didn't think poser was setup to allow distributed renders... or even HT or duel processors. But this wouldn't be my first time to be wrong today.

Assuming that it was feasable and you have a site license for Poser for mutliple installations, I would go for the fastest cpu, 2 gig Ram, fast HD, cheap video card and a cheap monitor. A switch box and a couple of cables and you can share the monitors. Don't really need them while rendering. Same thing for the video card, don't need it while rendering. This concept is just for rendering, nothing else.

that's what I'm looking for...just rendering machines...as cheap as possible, but yet fast enough to get some work done. Anything would be a plus over just one system churning, so it wouldn't even have to be all that fast...affordable is key. no monitors...other than the main... Is there any benefit to Intel vs. AMD ??? 64 bit AMD ? it is faster, but obviously no 64bit support yet. Dual processing for Vue?

Can't help with the other questions. AMD vs Intel? Some say AMD is faster, some say Intel is , some say it's so close to really care. What I look for is reliability and comaptability. In the past AMD had issues with Microsoft.

Those issues were resolved. AMD had some of the best minds that worked on the Alpha processor for DEC involved in the design of the Athlon and Athlon 64. At the moment, 64 bitness isn't a real factor. That said, the Athlon 64's are the fastest processors out there, run 32 bit apps in native mode, were designed. Vue is currently optimized for the Intel chips and hyperthreading, but -observed- performance is that AMD is right up there. And if you decided to, for example, build with the Athlon 64, you could get the socket 939 motherboard. All it would take to enable using the X2 dual core processor is a BIOS flash (but check the maker's website just to be sure). Going from a single core P4 to one of their dualies is going to require a new motherboard and memory. So you have to consider what your upgrade costs will be in the future as well...