retiring render farm

[cheerioboy]

I've got a Helmer modded render farm I'm considering retiring. Thinking if I get rid of it - I'd replace with a single machine for simplicity sake. Any thoughts on what might be comparable?

5x i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz

Am I correct in calculating that this setup was giving me 70GHz of render power? With each CPU being quad core?
Looks like the closest I'd get to matching is a dual Intel Core i7-6950X 25M Broadwell-E 10-Core 3.0 GHz LGA 2011-v3 - which would amount to 60GHz. And with it being a full tower I could even put GPUs in eventually.

Vray Benchmark won't let me use DR to see what my total processing power of my setup is, right? I could then compare the render time to other processors.

[cheerioboy]

I'm looking at this again now that there's even fresher hardware - Just calculating GHz, I was considering used 2x Xeon E5-2699 V4 processors, that would blow the 5x i7-3770K away. And my wallet.

Ran the Vray Benchmark on a single render node (CPU only), it took 4:15, divided by 5 machines, 0:51 would be the time to beat with a single setup, correct? Looks like from the benchmark results list, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X sits around that time on its own. Unless I want to go further and have hardware that surpasses my current setup.. But maybe with the CPU matching - I can start to look at GPU power.

[Raven]

Or wait a few months and look at the threadripper 2

[delineator]

Threadripper 2 would/should be great. And fits in current TR4 socketed boards, which is a HUGE plus.

As your probably realizing, flat ghz measurements don't mean anything. I personally use cinebench to analyze and calculate scale and efficiency. Its fairly ubiquitous, and almost any review outlet that has a new CPU in their hands will post a cinebench score, so it should give you an idea of where the CPU is at (threadripper 2 for example is rumoured to be 6,000 cinebench!). A single 3770k looks to be about 700 cinebenches, so maybe 3500 with your farm. That would put you at a single 7980xe right now, which ain't too shabby for a single cpu. Compare prices though, and definitely wait until threadripper 2 pricing is at least announced - should see deep discounts on 1950x's at that point