desktop rig compatibility questions

[xxdanbrowne]

So giving the network rendering some consideration (given that it sounds like a piece of cake to get it set up on a local LAN) I started to think about building out cheapish render nodes on the LAN instead of getting a new lappy.

So if I were to go down this route what are the gotchas?

I'm thinking about building out a bare bones AMD CPU + gigabyte motherboard with a couple of PCIE 2.0 slots, everything pretty low spec but going for graphics cards with the biggest amount of VRAM for cheap.

So.... can I use an AMD CPU motherboard in Octane?
AND
What about the graphics cards? Could I use a couple of low end 640GTXs with 4GB of RAM each as a render node without any major problems?

If this kind of rig would work I figure I could get four networked render nodes with 2 cards each for the same price as a new lappy.