I considered that. The key here is that I was losing a lot of time by hitting render and not returning immediately once the render was complete. And due to the nature of the directors process, I can't just batch render everything in one fell swoop, I have to animate a shot, render, animate render. I also did some (non-scientific) benchmarking and it turns out that removing 2 / 8 cores on my machine had a smaller effect than the expected. 8 Cores rendered at around 48s / frame. You would expect 6 to render at 64s / frame but in practice it rendered at around 56s/ frame. Render times looked like I only lost 1 core, surprisingly.

But yeah, the biggest thing was that I would spend hours away from the system doing nothing of note and come back and it would be done rendering, and I would have missed some large amount of time where the prompt just read "Render Complete." Now, with dual screen, the moment it finishes I can save and jump in. The MOST efficient thing given the directoral constraints would be to render each shot and sit with the computer doing nothing, but given the very low pay...

Sega can wait 1/(n*2) - [time that would have been spent AFK]