Premiere exports and rendering too slow

Question

I’m using Premier Pro CC on a 2012 MacPro (aluminum box) with 16gigs or RAM.
I have to say that being a long time Avid Media Composer editor I am very, very pleased with the UI and overall capability of Premiere. It’s loaded with tiny nuances that Avid should have incorporated a long time ago. I am in love with this software.
Or at least I was until I went to export my files. What a slog! I’m sorry but the exports are out to lunch. A six minute 1080p 23.976fps sequence with a few titles, a basic colour effect and two tracks of audio takes…. 3 hours?!?!?? What the heck? If I was rendering an equivalent sequence in the Avid I’d be done rendering any effects and exporting a source QT by the time I finished this sentence. And if I set that QT up to encode in Sorenson I’d have my MP4 done by the end of this email. And the Avid doesn’t need to use any external hardware to ramp things up. In addition, just typing this email while Media Encoder pushes through the output (even with Premiere closed) is causing my whole system to slow down to a point that I find my computer basically unusable for anything else. 16 gigs of RAM and 2x six core processors and it’s acting like it’s 1996 running OS7.
Now wait, I hear you say, you can do so much more in Premiere. Yes, I can. But the moment I drop, for example, an After Effect link in there…I can feel the system trying to race glaciers - and losing. What I don’t get is if I were to use the the equivalent clips in After Effects doing the equivalent type of effects the render would be way faster than Premiere --- and it’s the same company! And don’t get me started on Speedgrade. I’m better off doing an oil painting of each frame than using that Dynamic Link function. And teh dynamic links are what encouraged me to try all this in the first place.
Pre-rendering everything is not only awkward but appears to have no effect on the export time - or playback for that matter. In fact I find the rendering of effects rather confusing and horribly inaccurate - both in its estimate of time to go and the number of frames to process. And what is a 'video preview’ anyway -is that the number of clips? Effects?  Effects and clips? Grains of sand on a beach? And why does it’s number keep going up too? It just keeps climbing for no reason I can see. C’mon Premiere…it’s basic math- you count how many frames and then that’s the total number of frames. Why are you recalculating? And did you borrow your time estimate code from Windows 98’s progress bar? One thing it does tell you accurately is how much time you’ve been waiting. That’s handy (not). Oh and I sooooo love the fact that if I quit the rendering process it keeps NOTHING from what it did before. So i have two choices: quit this seemingly endless render to try something else only to find it didn’t help ... or stay put and watch my life drip away into nothingness. Right now, on a second sequence, it says "ETA - 13 seconds left" for, like the LAST 2 hours.
I can’t help but think Premiere is too caught up on render-free editing and it’s glorious Mercury Engine when they should be making it faster & easier to render effects for smoother playback and much faster exports. In my Media Composer I may not have as much robust real time function as I would like but it doesn't choke on the basics (title, colour crrection, dissolves) and the renders are so fast I don't care that I even have to render.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong but I’ll be damned if I know what. And no one else is talking. As I skip around the Google-sphere I’m amazed how many people are posing about speed issues (very common Google search result) and so many other editors are retorting “seems pretty normal to me”. No it ain’t. This is NOT normal. This is painfully slow and in no way reflects the current state of speed for import & exports in NLEs.
I’ve watched every tutorial I could find, picked over every preference, closed every other application, tried different media types, purged every bit of cache and even restarted with no discernible difference. At this stage I’d be thrilled to find out if I’m doing something wrong. But until then I’m afraid this software will not be a regular part of my tool set. This is very disappointing from Premiere given how everything else seems to work so well. Such a shame. This software could kick some serious butt otherwise.
Maybe Premiere will announce that they have a new render engine at NAB?…crossing fingers? Don’t think so.
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Answer 1

Thanks for the reply SAFEHARBOR11.
I agree, something isn't right. I've watched tutorials where the renders appear to happen in a "reasonable" amount of time and the numbers of frames and videos prviews never increases. So I don't know what is going on with me.
While I have researched into render/don't render workflow with Premiere I can say I tried both ways only out of desperation.
For my system, a MacPro from 2012, we got only one choice for a video card from Apple - ATI Radeon HD 5870. I tried to get a CUDA enabled card (3rd party) installed but despite tremendous research I could not find something that was authorized to work on my system. At the time I wanted the CUDA to accelerate by Sorenson encoding.
One 2011 post suggested  that my issue was related to corrupt media. They had suggested that I try and isolate the timeline down by testing one section at a time with exports until the exports went from fast to excruciatingly slow. As I was working on multiple sequences without common media between them I had reasoned that the software may not have liked my Sony F5 native media (although it plays it just fine). So I took the time to transcode all my footage and use that instead—  with absolutely no difference. Even if it did make a difference I’d be disappointed because working natively with my media in Premiere was a huge time saver, unlike the Avid which claims to work with native media but really it leaves the system and editing sow & unresponsive so I usually end up transcoding anyway.
My media encoder settings were the template h264 as a Youtube 720p, 23.976 file. Nothing remarkable there. (Although I did  try other settings to see if that affected anything - it didn’t).
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