Installed the network render software on our new render farm last night and started to do some initial testing. I ran an animation on both the farm and two of our workstations and had the following results:
Workstation 1 (24 cores): dual x5690's (3.47ghz) with 32gb of ram, water cooled, Windows 7 Pro
Averaged 58 sec per frame.
Workstation 2 (24 cores): identical to workstation 1 but overclocked from 3.47 to 4.01 on air.
Averaged 50 sec per frame.
Render Farm (160 cores): (1) DL160 G6's, dual L5520 (quad core 2.26ghz), 16gb ram, Windows 7 Pro
(4) DL160 G6's, dual x5570 (quad core 2.93ghz), 16gb ram, Windows 7 Pro
(5) DL160 G6's, dual x5667 (quad core 3.04ghz), 16gb ram, Windows 7 Pro
Averaged 9 sec per frame.
Some interesting observations that we saw were that the x5570's and x5667's ran almost the same amount of frames while the L5520 was only able to complete about half as many frames. We have two more x5570 processors to swap into that server. We wanted to get everything up and running before making the swap.
So the render farm is 6.5 times faster than workstation 1 and 5.5 times faster than workstation 2.