In the thread linked, there is no mention of render times on the examples.

Render quality and speed are two different things.

No offense. Those are great example of the settings, but without render times for each, they can't be apply to render speed by anyone else.

Other tricks to speed up test renders is to ask yourself what really needs to be in the render. And what nodes really need to be there.

If you are looking at things like skin color, there is no need to render the props/hair/relections/etc unless they are light emitters in an idl scene. If they are light emitters, hide them from the camera, so they will still do the lighting. Carefully choosing what emits light and what doesn't, will change the render speed as well.

If just about everything in the scene is a light emitter, that pass will obviously take a while. Chances are good that can turn off light emitter on a lot of things and it will have very little change to the render quality, but improve the speed.

Closing unneeded programs running in the background can help as well, to a point anyway. Nothing worse than running a render and have the op system start a scheduled task.

Which way you render it changes the time it takes as well, internal, external, send it to queue.

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