Why are my render times 30+ minutes, but other people's are ~3 minutes? I am currently using Sheep It! to render my blend (built on v2.68c) on multiple computers, and I noticed something rather strange. According to the log on-site, the frames rendered from other people's blends were completing in 3 to 4 minutes. This was on an 4 core i5. My main rig (with an 8 core i7) was completing frames in no less than half an hour. How is this possible?

To clarify, these people's frames are very complex, often with very detailed textures. I have 2 objects in my blend. Below are the options I changed for my blend:


Aspect Ratio: 1000px x 1000px
Output: PNG
Clamp Indirect: 0.98
Render Sampling: 128
Min Light Bounces: 0
Max Light Bounces: 4
Cycles Render


Is there something in there that I should change to make it go faster? I can't really comprehend how it's going to quickly.

EDIT: To answer what @Duarte asked...


System Specs: i7-920, 3GB DDR3, GT 630, Windows 10
I have two circles, extended to form a sort of coin with a star on it. It is not complex at all.
I have Firefox and Steam running in the background, but not actively. I've been away from the computer for 8 hours and noticed this behavior. (I am running Blender from Steam.)
I made sure when I began rendering that the blend was set for CPU rendering.
Screenshots








And to answer what @pycoder asked, yes, I am using Cycles Render.
You have Square Samples ticked under your Sampling render settings. It squares whatever sample value you have setup.

You have 128 samples specified so 128^2 = 16384 so you are basically attempting to render with 16384 samples which is a lot.