external render box. do they exist?

[Golf1.6]

The design guys in our office use mac pro and unfortunately the render ability on hte mac isn't great. I wanted a legitimate [read that again] way to speed up the rendering ability without breaking Apple's EULA.

Does an external render box exist? Would it be possible to build a machine which works with the mac and efectively takes the burden of rendering off the mac, does it in record time and then spits it back out to the mac. Or perhaps just assists the max to render quicker in some other way?

 

[MagicBoy]

There's 9 years worth of Mac Pros. How old are we talking, what spec and what software are they using?

 

[bloodiedathame]

The render ability of them is actually pretty good. The machines could probably do with an SSD, more RAM and perhaps some better GPUs, but unfortunately the GPU options are limited.

External render boxes do exist but you'll be spending a lot to get something off the shelf ie Boxx. Could build your own PC based farm too. Cheapest way to do it would be to use render farms like Rebus or set up your own cloud based renderer, but you'd need a very fast upload and download speed in order to get your files to the renderer and down again.