Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.

You get 9% better performance than a Core i7 975 and 98% of the performance of the 980X. Not too shabby, but then again you're not saving a ton of money by comparison. The Core i7 970 still costs roughly $900.
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.

Single threaded performance is very competitive, which is due entirely to Intel's well architected turbo modes. You get a 6-core processor that can act like the fastest single-core CPU on the planet if needed.

POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
