without an Nvidia video card on an dual Xeon Quad (8/16) 2.6GHz., 64GB RAM, Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB DDR5 (which Iray has no use for) it took 32 minutes to render a pair of glasses with two lights, so a plastic default shader used twice, once with a transparency at 1024x768 No other geometry in the scene. I was able to get better results out of LuxRender in 4 minutes.

If your using a decently powerful system without "a good nvidia card" expecting 10 minutes for a "reasonable" scene is not a realistic result. The engine was developed for Nvidia cards to take advantage of it, not CPU and RAM, they are an afterthought.

Secondly Dual socket is exclusively XEON when it comes to Intel CPU architecture,. You can't run two i7's at the same time on the same board, it doesn't exist.