Hi MrDOS.

The problem with chasing down specs is that there are upgrades to all parts coming out all the time. Internal houskeeping of the computer is also a big factor. How you use your hards drives, which hard drives and how they are set up and a host of other things. I'm also sure most software companies don't have time or the inclination to test each and every bit of hardware on the market. They publish minimum specs on which their product should run but there is no guarantee at the end of the day as things such as recording or reading from a fragmented drive or bottlenecks in motherboard designs etc can also have an impact on render times. You say you are using an HP 6 core machine but which processor? What hard drives? What is the motherboard? As far as I can ascertain from people here, intel CPUs that have inbuilt graphics processing cabablities will do better than an AMD chip. Faster hard drives like the Weston Digital blacks or a faster solid state drive will do better than say WD RED drives but be careful about longevity of faster hard drives as to which you pick. There are other issues such as north or south bridge specs on the motherboard (I can't remember which but one of them is very important) and ram speeds and amounts.

Then there is the projects themselves. How many tracks? How many effets applied? How much rendering is required? What type and size of files? How much money do you have?

Each component you add may cause a bottleneck elswhere as newer components outperform older ones. It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. I'm currently waiting for a one hour video to render and has taken the best part of a day of processing. The New Blue effects I'm using within the project, can't it seems run any faster and the CPU and hard drives are just barely ticking over. Fun or what?