Quote - > Quote - I found my main quad core content creator would only run around 50% CPU on a network render and all 4 cores would be 100% on a local render. I stopped using Rendercows until I could get all 5 up to fast dual cores or quad cores with 4gb ram each. (1 upgrade left to go). I will use the same render farm for PoserPro 2010.

ALSO PLEASE DON'T EXPECT IT TO CUT THE RENDER TIME IN HALF. WITH YOUR SETUP EXPECT ABOUT A 15% SPEEDUP

If you would, send me a PM here. I am curious as to your setup because I have two computers now I am using but want to expand that and would like to discuss more on that with you. With 5 different dedicated machines with those specs, you should be getting awesome render times.

With my NEW AND IMPROVED setup I expect a 50 to 75% reduction of render times, not 1/5  of the current render time.
I haven't used the cows since Vue 7 when they were mostly 32bit OS, Dual core pcs with 2gb ram. It cut down times quite a bit, but wasted an imense amount of time sending things back and forth on the network. One was a 100mb connection the rest gb connections. It wasn't worth the extra noise and heat at that time so I decided to upgrade all of them to quad core 4 and 8 gb ram 64 bit OS at considerable cost in spite of being home built. The last cow was upgraded this week and I was about to upgrade them all to 8.4 when on Friday my main content creater blew a power supply. I canibalized the last cow (all have 750 watt PS) to fix Main PC but it still took several hours
Since then I blew my main power supply after a 20 mile ocean kayak adventure and near drowning so i'm in the hospital having a stint placed in my heart vein, minor procedure but time consuming.
As I found out, don't even bother with cows that don't support GB network connections, don't throw a laptop or underpowered pc into the mix, its ram limitation and CPU cache etc aren't up to the task.
When I am finished I will not include the content creator in the farm since it doesn't run at full cpu utilization it is free to use Poser and photoshop after effects etc