I am seeking some advice from some of you gurus.  Currently I have a Intel Duo2 2.4 GHz computer 4 gigs mem and Win XP 32bit.

I am going to assemble a small render farm/node so I can render out some animations.  I am going to get 3 computers to do the rendering.  Their configurations are as follows:  Intel Duo Quad 2.4 GHz, 4 gigs ram and Vista 64 bit.

Essentially I will have 14 processors to do the rendering.  My questions are as follows:

1. With my single Duo2 computer, if it takes say one hour to render an animation, will the addition of the others make it exponentially faster?  In other words, if two processors take 60 minutes, will 14 do the rendering in 4.28 minutes? or at least, reasonably close to that?

2. Since the rendering machines will only be used for rendering animations and still vue scenes, is 4 gigs enough for these machines?  My understanding is all they do is receive info from my main computer, process the results and send it back for my main computer to put the image together.  Am I correct? 

Side note* I will upgrade my main computer in the next year to be much beefier but for now I am focusing on the rendering computers

I would appreciate any input as nothing is set in stone and I can still customize my choices.

Thanks much