Questions about network rendering???

The engine I’d be using is Blender internal, and I got some questions about network rendering. Sorry if this is the wrong place but technical support did not seem ideal for this, to me.

I’m asking because I recently built a new powerhouse PC and my old one is just sitting here, I also have another PC sitting in a closet.

My old one has an AMD 8370
The one in the closet has a haswell i5.
My new one has an i7 5820k.

I’m already hooking my old one up for a server but I figured I’d grab the other one too, they’ll just be in sleep mode when they’re not being used, I’ll be controlling them remotely from my main PC.

QUESTIONS!

1.Once hooked up, will these all be able to work on the same frame at a time or will they each get a frame to render?

  1. Can I visually see it rendering somewhere?

Well same frame rendering is very rare and you probably wont be able to see any updates.

I use Loki to distribute my stuff it is very simple to use and it just works. Loki can do same frame renders but it is not optimal

  1. Every machine does it’s own separate frame
  2. I think so?

but remember
MAKE SURE THE TEXTURES PATHS ARE ACCESSIBLE FROM EVERY PC
I can not stress this enough.

Loki packs them

I have used a network render on 24 systems, yes, an entire computer room as a network render

Each PC gets its own frame
And you see the induvidial frame rendering in each pc
and in the master server it tells you some stuff about the process
And the master generates a local website, with shows the progress in great detail (eg. What frames are rendered, and their progres)

But as said in here already, you must pack all files into the blend, or make them accesable on each node, but better pack them