As has been said its down to the processor at the end of the day. I have the use of 3 rendermachines by Boxx Tech 1gb of ram and twin zeons 2.4ghz in each. No cards. Just the Maya Batch render software and Muster despatcher software too.

My own personal machine has a 3.06ghz proc, hyperthread and does pretty good. I rendered a scene recently with GI_Joe, fog, PFX and Maximum 2048 color Spec and bump maps and the mighty beast of Ray Traced soft shads!!! 20mins for an 1800dpi Render. my card is an FX 5200 with 128mb on it, not that it got a look in mind.

Also to speed up the render process use your render layers regularly too!!!

What size was the video incidently that was rendered out?

_J