Some of these comments are ridiculous. There’s nothing crappy about a Xeon whatsover. You can’t overclock a quadcore to get remotely close to a 12 core + rig. You can’t even take a 4.5Ghz i7-6950x and expect it to compete on the same field as a dual socket 64 logical core Xeon rig.
I’m also interested in a standard benchmark and may end up making my own so we can have some objective measurements to work with. I was having issues using swarm agent to get more than 8 cores for lightmass and a production build was over half an hour. Now that the farm is rocking in full swing, my build time is less than 2 minutes. Try to do that within the same power envelope with a bunch of i7’s networked together. It’s just not happening.
Guess I don’t have to mention they are all rack-mounted at my residence and ready to roll-out to the datacenter for remote operation once my business gets going. i7s make cheap workstations, but they are no substitute for the real thing.