

Other than that, I have a total of 24 processes running at any given time, not including HitFilm, Blender, Gimp, X-Normal and Foobar.

The only time that I have "Avast" active is if I go online. So, even though it has, and is set to use all of my 2 x 8 core processors with multi-threading enabled, 64gigs Ram and 3 x 4gig GPUs that can handle insanely heavy 3D scenes with multiple programs and services running in the background, I stop or disable any processes, services that I don't need. I just put together my first PC build, it's actually a Workstation built for video editing, VFX and pretty much anything having to do with 3D software. That's two more background processes eating up a small amount of CPU.

Maybe someone has Nero running or Adobe, without turning off Adobe download notifications. Someone with my identical hardware and OS migbt be running Avast or Norton which is sitting there using processor cycles and slowing things down.

I don't have persistent Antivirus running. An identical hardware configuration might have a different speed on Win 8 ir 10 as both of those require more overhead. Maybe my HDD was just defragged and the other isn't. Even with an "identical" hardware configuration times might not match-perhaps the other system got a slightly better GPU off the line that overclocked a bit faster. Now, if we compare benchmark times what, exactly, accounts for time differences-mobo, CPU, RAM, GPU and/or drives could all be the difference. What I DON'T know offhand is my mobo, and that could be another source of slowdown. Right now I know a bottleneck is the HDD, but I also know my SSDs could have been faster if I had put in a single 512GB drive and let it have both M2 slots. I'm running an Intel i7-6700HQ GHZ, nVidia 980m (8GB), 64GHZ of 2300MHZ DDR4 RAM with two M2 Sandisk 256GB SSDs for system, software and cache with a 1TB 7200RPM HDD as a work/library drive. There are so-so many potential hardware configurations out there and so many things that can bottleneck a system that a benchmark won't narrow down the options. They can just help compare relative overall system speeds. The problem, Kevin, is a benchmark scene won't help find bottlenecks as such. The Harry Potter scene and anything with models works for Pro, but not Express (no models or particles in Express). One was supposed to render the entire scene. The previous benchmark scene was the old Harry Potter tutorial (so some grading, some lightning and some particles/forces/deflectors).
