The idea is to have a point to compare machine to machine, so no change can be done before the render. The settings are for a good result with GI without lots of splat shadows artifacts.
If everyone use your system to render the scene file we can look at it and see how other system performe the same scene... so we can determine the real diference between a Core 2 Duo 2.4 and a Core 2 Duo 3.0 for example.

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