It is the Classic 3D renderer. I ended up doing exactly as you suggested last night – adjusted workflow. I lowered resolution, and turned off motion blur while working. This made things much smoother.
I had some issues with the media cache though. I created a SSD Raid specifically for the media cache and allotted 100GB of space. Is there a way for my comps to automatically cache or do I have to manually push ctrl+return every time I make a tweak? The cache was finicky and sometimes wouldn’t render in the background. If I started to work, the render would stop all together.
I miscalculated when I built my machine, should have gone for the dual xeons.
Appreciate the help.