XEON Servers good for Rendering?

Recently i´ve been stumbling about a couple of relatively cheap refurbished DELL and HP Servers with, let´s say 4 XEON 8-Core CPU´s and tons of RAM for 600-800 EUR.

For a workstation with that equipment, you would pay at least double the price...

Are these machines good for rendering?

Depending on the software you want to render on, you might not be able to use more than a 2P system with a Windows Operating System.

Some people experimented running Windows as a virtual machine through WINE & Ubuntu or similar Linux distros, but I have no real experience with it and how easy it is to setup. There are some articles around.

For more guesstimates on the performance to be expected, you need to give us more information on the CPU models etc.

I would think that a more straightforward approach with less "guessing" would be buying used / discounted s2011 E5 CPUs and go for a still relevant 2P node like Juraj describes in his blog - and many threads in this forum.

http://talcikdemovicova.com/32-thread-build-on-budget/