Word to the Wise…
“As you may or may not be aware, there appears to be an issue in 3ds max r7 and r8 where certain components leave the 3ds max state set incorrectly – causing one or more of the CPUs in a machine to fluctuate in performance.
This tends to affect elements of 3ds max and third party plugins which are highly threaded; Brazil r/s is such a third party plugin, and the effect of the issue is essentially that a dual (or higher) processor machine, such as AMD Opterons, may render at a lower performance than it’s capable of”
This issue may affect you even if you don’t use Brazil for rendering
http://forums.splutterfish.com/viewtopic.php?t=5846&sid=e807d911765a65dc14b80a9a7d95dc68