Nope. It needs to meet the minimum needs of the OS, with a smidgen more resources on top of that. The weakest box in my garden was an Athlon 700 (slot A) with all of 384 megs of PC-100 sdram. But it was enough to run Win2k, and with a 40 gig HDD, there was enough real estate for the swapfile. A lot of the overhead in Vue (any flavor) is the GUI; a cow is basically the bare rendering engine with a TCP/IP front end, and no openGL handles to keep track of. It throws out a flag that says it is idle, takes and stores textures then the scene file, and executes a render. When done, it flags done and sends the finished frame to the manager. Now the Athlon 700 was also a lot slower per frame than the XP-1700 and 1800's in the rest of the boxes, but it was still stable and reliable. The only reason you need renderboxes the same general specs as the controller system is to get a consistent speed per frame across the renderfarm.