So, i'll share my personal experiences with the network rendering solution here, what hadrware was used, what were the settings and so on.
I bought with my company the license for 96 cores. currently in use are 80 cores / incl threads:
Intel xeon e5 2620v2's x4
intel xeon e5 2660 v2 x2
A client of mine uses my hardware to do product renderings of various iphone and mcabook cases.
He used 2 intel xeon E5 2670v1's to get his benchmark score, and with my render farm we saw an increase of rendering performance of 6x.
That means that his renders that took 6 hours or more to complete took my renderfarm 1 hour.
He was rendering in 5k.
When rendering with huge textures, the system took sometimes longer to render, becaus eof DPI settings.
The purpose of this post is to showcase what performance benefit you can get even when using pretty old hardware and spending around 5K USD on just hardware.
If you can / or have the knowhow on how to build a computer, you can easily get this setup done with used parts from ebay.
My suggestion is to go with Intel xeon e5 2670v1's and a couple of lga 2011-1 motherboards, each system can cost up to 1k and all you need to install is windows, and vcredist x86 / 64 for the system to recognize the slave / master / que program.