How to improve Cycles Render times on a model Space Craft? I am using Cycles Render to light and animate my model. I'm using a single light source (to represent the Sun) the model just rotates and moves towards the camera.

I know rendering is not fast but I am not looking for photorealistic results just something similar to the photo below. Preview renders are very fast and the quality appears to be acceptable, I would like to know how I can tweak a final render to push frames out to a similar speed as the preview renders (with little noise).

Currently, final renders are taking on average 6-8 minutes per frame, this isn't exactly terrible but I would like them to render as fast as previews which take around 30-40 seconds. I am using GPU Compute to render and my system is as follows:

Intel i7 4 core 6700K - 32gb Corsair Ram - Nvidia GTX 1060 6gb GPU - SSD for OS and SSD for programs - Windows 10 Pro - 

Any advice would be great!
When using the GPU, blender actually renders fast with larger tile size: 

There is an addon called auto tile size that will configure this for you. (It can be found in File > User Pref > Add-ons > Auto Tile Size ). If you would rather tweak it manually you can find the tile size in the performance section in the render tab.

Another thing you can do is turn down the bounces and turn off caustics. (These are found in the light path section in the render tab). I would turn down light bounces a lot especially because there is only one light source.

Happy Rendering!

Sources: BlenderGuru