I do a lot of After effects work. Rendering seems to be taking up a lot of my time. Is there anything hardware/software I can buy to speed up rendering of complex projects?

Anyone use Gridiron Nucleo Pro? Is it worth it?

I'm on the AE Mailing List and Nucleo screams...You can check out the archive or their web site. (http://www.media-motion.tv/ae-list.html)

Out of the box, you can setup the after effects render engine on other computers to distribute the load and drop your render times. Nucleo is a good solution if you are stuck to one computer.

Check out this script as well, which runs multiple instance of the AE Render engine to speed up renders:

http://www.aenhancers.com/viewtopic.php?t=544

AE CS3 or Nucleo are your best options. CS3 runs much faster on multi processor systems.

I am on an Dual Opteron 270 system. 4 physical cores.

Does AE take advantage of the Quad Core CPU's?

Does AE take advantage of the Quad Core CPU's?

CS3 will, but not AE 7 or earlier.