I put together a new machine today to use as the PAX demo machine. It was $400, and it's a quad-core.

Since at $400, I could replace my very aged render farm for less than $2500, I decided to do a test to see how much faster this thing could render.

The results were shocking. As an example, on the P4's I left a poster-sized render (approx. 4k x 6k) on for 10 hours and it came back at SL 0.6. That's like unusable - it basically means that you haven't even gotten to the first tier of light collection. On the quad-core, it's at 20 minutes right now and it's at SL 4. It probably would have taken the P4 a week to get to SL 4.

In the best of all possible worlds, I could just swap out the motherboard, CPU, and memory on the farm and it would cost even less (something like $1500), and would save a ton of time wrt reinstalling. But I'm assuming that XP will just totally lose its shit if you drive to plug an old install into a new motherboard. Re-authorization requirements aside, I'm guessing it will have all the wrong INFs or something.

But regardless, I think I will probably replace the farm after PAX, because a 20x-at-minimum speed boost is kind of impossible to ignore. It means the exterior shot renders would go from a day to 30 minutes.