Experimenting to perfect my workpipeline.
At the moment I have a stationary computer to work out the projects and a dualcore-laptop to render away indepently during day and night.
At the moment the laptop renders two threads parallel , 950 frames, reflections, transparency, volumetriclights, gold material 1024x576 needs
about 100 hours each thread.
So my question is: In order to speed up that workflow, would it be better to set up more dual-core computers and feed them with different chunks
to render or would a quadcore solve better, dividing the tasks into four different threads?

(I think netrender is no longer supported and in the end ,I just used it to make the startup-CD obsolete anyhow.)

AM doesn't take advantage of more cores in rendering. So, you're better to divide up and have as many AM instances running as possible......even two on the one machine if it can handle it. I have a dual core and it doesn't get warm (no fan comes on) when one instance of AM is rendering. I also have lots of ram (64 bit) so I can open another instance and get the other core working.

well, thatà about the same expierience I have with my dualcore laptop.

But has anybody expierience with quad cores yet?

Would every instance of AM automatically grab one core for the rendering task?

I am using a quadcore at work and often I run three instances of A:M to render things and one to work for example in AfterEffects or A:M. I made the experience that it is most often better to let Windows determine how to split the cpu-power (for all four cores) than for example assigning one core to one process.

I can even render with four cores and I get about 370% of cpu-power out of it. (I made a test with it... I rendered with one instance a sequence of 40 images and I rerendered it with 4 instances. 4 instances where about 3.7 times faster than one instance. What you should have is enough RAM (I am running Win XP Prof 64bit with 8 GB) and than it runs very smoothly.

I although tried to assign the cpus to the master.exe-processes and that resulted in a freezing desktop. It was only possible to use 3 instances and they werent as fast. So let Windows determine how to deal with it and have enough RAM and it should work fine.

But there is another question today: Buy 2 Dualcore-pcs (for example with a Athlon 64 5600+ which isnt very expensive anymore) or one Quadcore-pc? I cant say much about that and which will result in faster renderings so...

*Fuchur*