While my desktop I7 920 does a good job I'm figuring on building a few boxes for rendering as time and finances allow.

Vue 8 Complete allows up to 5 PCs for network rendering so I thought I'd build a cheap PC and farm it as I can aford to.

So this is a bang for buck question, I was considering somthing built around a dual CPU motherboard with some cheap I7 quad cores.

or

Splurge and grab a server with four Xeon CPUs.

Anyone here with experiance regarding this or other suggestions?