I'm remarkably happy with my laptop it does all of the editing I currently need to do and it's portable the only I only run into issues when i'm trying to do any rendering or compressing. I've used to some success the compressor software with qmaster so I think I would like to try and setup my own cluster or render farm to take advantage of it.

I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to try and build a "hackintosh" render farm as it would be a waste it seems to get a whole bunch of macs with video cards etc to setup. With a very basic setup I think I could build 3 dual quadcore 2.33ghz machines and pop on qmaster giving me in effect 24 cores with which to work the obvious downside is that it would be a "hacked" product to run apple software and it would strictly exist only as a render farm (without adding to the cost)

For the same price I could buy a bottom of the line mac pro which has all of the benefits of being a plug and play mac. Also I suppose I would be able to take advantage of local processor intense applications like color. I would probably make that my editing computer though leaving my macbook pro to kinda go to waste (except of course for location stuff) the other downside would be 8 cores (though faster) as opposed to 24 I'm not 100% sure what the difference computing wise would be and if it would even be worthwhile to try and have 24 cores on the other hand it could mean 2-3x the speed of the render which would be awesome.

I'm just looking for any thoughts or suggestions? Has anyone tried something like this yet?

Not all software support distributed rendering... e.g. FCP, as far as I know, doesn't support it.

I think you're right so the only real advantage would be for compressor, in which case it would probably better to let FCP have the 8 core's instead...

Unfortunately FCP only allows for distributed processing for Compressor (ver 3) not for rendering individual segments in a timeline.

Well that sort of decides it then I guess!
Thanks guys!