So far we’re usually seeing the expected performance boost from a single process. Some frames slow down to equal a much cheaper machine although Vlado said that ForestPack might be the culprit and the new update could possibly help those frames.
I’m going to post a long blog post on our Rendernode shopping with a huge excel spreadsheet. The real quick basics though broke down as such over 5 years:
Relative Value (5 yr costs, relative to CPUMark/$):
E5 2680 v3 x2: 100%
E5 2650 v3 x2: 99% <--What we ended up buying.
E5-2690 v3 x2: 97%
i7-5960x : 70%
i7-5930k : 66%
i7-5820k : 65%
i7-3930k : 63%
Zync: 32%
Azure: 23%-25%
Rebus: 7%-15%
Those are based off of theoretical numbers. We aren’t quite hitting them. Sometimes we’re getting as low as 50-60% of the performance “expected” from benchmarks but that’s less than 50% of the time so I still feel confident that the dual E5s are the way to go. You have to look at all of your licenses too and long term recurring costs (networking, labor, real-estate etc). By our calculations the tail-end costs over 5 years for a render node are about $2,796.46 per machine. So yeah you could build an i7 5820k for $1231 by our estimates. But your total 5 year costs are closer to $4,000. By comparison a dual E5 costs $3,500 up front (nearly 3x as much) but once you add licensing and maintenance labor your’e looking at ‘only’ $6300 over 5 years. So for about 50% more you get nearly 156% more raw performance. And as alluded you can always run two max processes. Even over 1st-year expenses the dual E5-2650 theoretically bests everything else pretty handedly thanks to license expenses.