Forget the xeon, yes it supports 6 cores and as ctbram said Maya does not work with sli.

Dave

Worth an extra $700 maybe not, it's pretty hard to justify. But if your thinking of dropping $1,000 bux on a gfx card and you have the extra cash...

For me I'd rather have $1000 CPU and a $100 GPU...

Because the 6 core intel one will clock nice and stable up to 5.6GHz has HT and for me runs through simulations in realflow at least twice as fast. (as a 6 core amd at the same speed)

5 - 10 times faster at what? Won't speed up your rendering. Won't speed up your dynamic simulations will make your viewport rendering faster if you have a massive (and i do mean massive) animation...

BTW I use the ATI HD 6970 with no problems at all after a few driver tweaks viewport 2 working as well.

Intel Core i7-3960X <- most important bit get a bloody good motherboard as well

I personally would never spend the money on a Quadro total waste IMO spend any savings on decent ram and the above...