Dual Xeon or Dual i7?

All LGA 1366 processors are the same technology. They will perform the same when they have the same specifications. So two 3.46GHz 6-core processors will vastly outperform two 2.26GHz 6-core processors. Forget all the "meant for this or that" stuff you read, it's about specifications. The Xeon processor you are looking at allows you to use them to make a 2.26GHz 12-core system with 384GB of memory. The Core i7s can only be used in a single socket. So you could have two 3.46GHz systems. You won't be overclocking two processors unless you buy an SR2 which is the only board that allows you to overclock two processors, and honestly while it has its place, that place is not in a render farm due to stability.

Performance wise / value you may be better going with two systems using single processors rather than a dual processor system. However you need to know how to set this network up and manage it.

I should also mention you picked a processor designed to run under low power (L), you can buy 2.66GHz 6-core Xeon X5650s for the same price, which would be much better.

Xeon E5520 Vs I7

The i7 is more centered around things like rendering, a home pc, gaming and whatnot. As far as I know xeons are more based for servers than anything else. Check with other sources, but I think you'll probably be better off going with the i7's. If you have good enough cooling, definitely go with the i7's as the new sandy bridge 990x's can be over clocked to over 5ghz with good enough cooling. I'm not sure on this so maybe do some more googling, sorry I this hasn't helped.

Right now is the worst time to get a Mac Pro. Either wait until Apple updates them or build a Windows machine with an i7.

XEON is designed for Servers, where it comes to stability and flexibility, because you can put couple of them together and if one of the CPUs die, no data will be lost, and till you fix it the other one would take care of it; so I would say i7 is a better choice for 3dmax and home use.

If you don't mined I would recommend to consider an AMD based system as well. it's cheaper, and if you can cool it off properly, you can get better performance than i7. the only downside I can think of is cache, but I personally rather AMD phenom II X6 1100 which is 3.3Ghz.

I didn't think it was possible for a dual socket server board to support 2 i7s due to the fact that there is only one QPI. It may support one 990x, but are you sure about 2 of them??

But if that is the case and it will support 2X 990x, that would be the way to go. I'd ask on Tom's Hardware though, don't think it will work

yes they have the same socket but the motherboards that take two processors in a 1366 socket can ONLY TAKE Xeon processors

i7s dont have the necessary extra bits for communication between two processors whereas xeon processors do

however that said just for 3dmax i would just grab a i7 980x in a x58 chipset and run it with a quadro graphics card

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