Quad xeon motherborad

Super cheese sandwich

Anyone have one of those? 

Tobor

Four Xeons or one Xeon with 4 cores?

I have a dual Xeon system with eight cores, and I'd say its performance for rendering is just "okay."  An i5 is faster; an i7 is even faster Xeons are primarily for servers where a core can be dedicated to a specific processing thread. I use them because used Xeon-based Dell workstations are cheap on Craigslist.

Super cheese sandwich

Thanks for comment Tobor. I'm aiming to a motherboard capable of handle four xeons but I don't know if they have more technical problems than a single or dual motherboard.

Super cheese sandwich

Four xeons

Tobor

The number of CPUs should be fairly transparent to you. The OS (and the BIOS on the board) handle all the low-down details, and it appears to Windows and your apps that you have lots of cores. Suppose these are 6-core CPUs. When you open the process monitor, you'll see 24 cores. 

For Iray rendering at least, you get far more bang for the buck using a later-model (e.g. Pascal) nVidia card with 1500+ CUDA cores on it. Graphics cards tend to draw a lot of power, and I imagine your board will, too. The two most important things here is power supply rating and heat removal. I burned out a previous Dell T-5500 because of running too many 24-hour renders, and that machine had only a single CPU. When combined with the graphics card, there was just too much heat in there, and I didn't upgrade the fan system. In fact, I left the side cover off. Bad, bad, bad.