So I’ve been experimenting a bit with my setup.
I have a I9-9900K at 3.6GHz that’s 8 cores and 16 threads
My graphics card is no way near as new I “only” have a Geforce GTX 970 (Next thing to be upgraded)
Still I find that GPU compute for cycles performes a bit better. I set the sampling around 6 but the tiles I couldn’t use as big as in the course that really hurt performance for me. My best option was around 32 for x and y tiles.
If I say put it at 512 or something the image was somewhat rendered fairly quickly but it took some time to finish it up.
What I found was the weirdest was that denoice didn’t really change the rendering time at all. I even a few times got a bit longer render with denoice turned off.