build out a quad proc systems, or atleast a Dual Xeon box for faster rendering. Xeons come in Dual Core with big cache, so dualing xeons is alot like 3 Procs in a system performance wise.
I'd make sure I had atleast 4-8gb of ram and a high speed SATA raid for disk speed to get some good performance. Then there is OS choice, some people swear Macs are still faster and then some people I know are using Linux setups to do batch renders. But then again, Pinnacle 10 for Windows now can edit in HD, so
