Quote - I have been thinking of reviving some of my older PC's and using them as Render Cow nodes. A couple systems with only 2 gb of ram. My current Workstation is a few years old and limited to 4gb. I wonder has anyone looked at difference in render time with respect to multiple systems(even lower end stuff) vs more memory on your main system?

=GOOD= Idea!

And there will be a difference in rendertimes with systems with less memory; they hit the old swap file a lot harder, and hard drive access times are still the biggest bottleneck to system speed that exists. And the system you will have to be most wary of is your workstation; the rendercows are a lot more forgiving of load than the controlling system is (mainly because the controlling system has to grab a section of RAM to keep the overhead on the managed nodes handy....and the more nodes you add, the bigger that pool grows, and if you are running close to crash, well....).

Your main system will probably turn in the best performance, as it has all the resources resident; and the return from the rendergarden will depend on exactly what you are doing, and how many nodes are doing it. When I built my first garden, the slowest box in it was an Athlon 750 (yes, the original Sega cartridge). I would get one frame of animation out of it for every 20-30 frames from the combined other renderboxes. So the only time I fired that one up was when I rendered a long animation, and even then it was more an experiment than getting significant output from it.