No mate, no farm, just one intel i5.
There’s really nothing special in renders, I even didn’t use GI, just a technique I described on the previous page (for a global diffuse light and shadows I used vray ambient light, and within that light, I placed a vray dirt map (that way, the scene is equally lighted from everywhere, and have diffuse (AO) shadows), that’s kind a faking of GI, and a few lights more, both vray, both standard.
Other vray settings - by default.
As for the SSS. Well, in my humble opinion SSS is great, but often people think that can replace bad texture. I think the texture of the skin is many times “underrated”, and I would rather choose good texture with default scanline material, then bad texture and best SSS settings ever.
Just my opinion, I am not very experienced with that stuff.
I can share some scenes if you want, but without textures, because they are big, and my upload sucks.
Hope that helps a bit.
Actually, I’ll show you right now, in some simple scene:
Here it is… pretty much the same lighting, as in the scene (3ds max 2011).

Open a scene, and render.
As for the outdoor scene, it was even simpler (without volume light), and faster to render.