destino (8/14/2014)

---

I wondered about the power consumption of the keyboard, lots of flashing LEDS.;-)

I took your advice and cranked up the power setting to "Performance" accepting the defaults for that setting.

Lo and behold it dropped down to 2 mins 40 secs. In addition it was now appearing to use all cores for processing

Please accept an elephant stamp.:-D

I then did the obvious and took it back down to "balanced" to confirm that it was indeed a power setting that had done the trick and I still get 2.40.

A quick look at performance manager shows that it is still using most of the cores whereas before it was only using one.

I know performance tuning these beasts is a bit of a black art but ....

Thanks for your help. If you happen to have an explanation for what has switched this to using multiple cores and then staying there I'd appreciate a note.

I've shut SQL Server down completely and it is still utilising multiple cores.