Thanks for all the great information in here.  

A few more thoughts and questions.

First and most basic.  I thought when they said for example core 2 quad.  That meant 2 quad core cpus so 8 cores total.  That is the "2" meant 2 cpus and the quad or duo meant number of cores per cpu.  Is that correct? 

so in this link http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2049694,00.asp are they

a) comparing 4 cores with 2 cores

or are they

b) comapring 8 cores with 4 cores?

My other questions involve doing the pre render work in poser.  I will post my understandings/suspicions so anyone can jump in if they are incorrect.   

1)If my  machine is slow loading objects figures or Pz3s the bottleneck is most likely due to a slow hard drive.

2)if my machine is slow posing figures and moving through a keyframe timeline then my video card is most likely the biggest bottleneck. 

The next set of questions deals with whether you woudl be better off with one big machine with 2 quad cpus (8 cores) or say 2 machines with 2 duo cors renderfarmed (with 8 cores.) 

3) Is it an advantage if you have the one machine with say 4 gig or ram (assumign a of course a 64bit system) instead of say one duo core with 3 gig and the second with one gig?  For example, if you are rendering a large scene will the machine with only one gig potentially start swapping off the hard drive slowing the rendering process down?  Any other ideas?