so, some good news
the project is still on-time, with it likely dropping this coming weekend (barring any major issues)
i've been editing and mixing in Premiere, Photoshop, and Audition in parallel as renders have been coming out (thank you RAM, GPU, & CPU), so I just have to slot in the few remaining scenes and mix them
that being said, though, I completely blew past my original estimate of 80-90 hours of rendering
so far i've rendered about 300 hours of animation (and it's not that my custom PC is slow, completing about one high-convergence iray frame render about every 8 minutes, it's just that there are over 2,000 frames)
there may have been a small amount of scope-creep from when I posted the original render time estimate, but the end result will be better for it
I will admit to overclocking my graphics card to save a couple hours over a few scenes, but it hangs around 60-65 celsius under full load so it seemed just fine while the i7 CPU cruised at 58-60 celsius
not the newest gear, but still plenty capable for a rendering media machine
maybe I need a render farm :)

see you soon