A good unbiased render engine such as Maxwell Render  http://www.maxwellrender.com/  is just as fast, sometimes much faster,  as other render engines when high quality is required.

For instance, in **far less  **time that it takes Cinema to calculate GI, caustics etc I get a full size Maxwell Render on my screen.

Mant benchmarks were done for the earlier Maxwell 1.7, using different computers. Useful to see how someones system would perform with Maxwell.

I used it quite happily on my old Pentium 4 machine from 2005.