Well that system will be faster than your current one, but it's going to cost! If it's just rendering speed you're after personally I'd keep the system you have then add a couple of cheap render nodes to it.
For me it comes to cost to speed ratio I use an i7 as my main machine then i've got 3 amd 8350s networked as slaves.
Thats a total of 32 cores all running at 4.2ghz Mental ray satellite supports 4 slaves on one maya licence
The render node PC's cost around $375 USD each with 120gb SSD and 16gb of ram. So for the price you're going to spend on that machine i could buy 20 of them making 160 cores at 672ghz PassMark score of 179,580. I'll break it down if you like.
My system with 3 slaves cost way way less and gets a PassMark of 35,916 for the cpu's (which is what i'm interested in) the system you're looking at comes in at around 16,283 (no overclocking). Now if i used 4 render slaves with satellite I'd get a passmark score of 35k just using the slaves at a cost of $1,500 bux leaving me free to continue working on my main machine. Now you need to take network overhead into account but i'd bet i'd be rendering twice as fast for the price of just one of the gfx cards in your new system
This setup also lets me just farm out the render and keep working. If it's just speed you are after there are much much cheaper ways to get it. That said it's not the easiest solution.
Also you did not say which render engine you were using so I can't cover licensing fees but if you're just using mental ray... well you get 4 nodes out the box with maya so...
If you've got money to burn go for it. If it's just rendering speed you're after and you're looking to save some cash there are IMO better ways to get that speed
Dave
From a readers' Q and A column in TV GUIDE: "If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?"
