[maudib]

A couple of things to remember when building render nodes. Use minimal PSU's, 300 watts is plenty to drive a cpu, HDD and a cooling fan. Even then, getting a 400 hundred dollar electric bill after a month of rendering can be alarming!

Try to get a Motherboard with on board video, that way you don't need a video card. AMD is way cheaper than Intel stuff! You need a switch box to link all the nodes together in a network. Finally, you need to use your workstation PC as the controller of your rendering array. So you need a 3rd party rendering app or as in the case of Lightwave, I just use the free screamer-net app that comes with the program. Render-man and Butterfly net-render are also good 3rd party apps.

Get the render farm going, and suddenly making CGI shots is fun! I just load up a scene and let the render farm crack away for a couple of days. What could have taken 6 months of rendering on a single PC is done in a couple of days.