Does Bitwig not have a Freeze function like Ableton that temporarily renders plug-ins to audio to save CPU?
Quite possibly 
Im starting to understand the power of Operator but not understanding that much of fm yet. Been my main bass lately.
Been doing a bit of internet digging and found an interesting post where one of the UHE Devs mentioned that Dune 3 is their benchmark for a very CPU optimised synth so they tried to beat it with Hive which is advertised as being very efficient.
This suggests either of these two options might be a good choice.
When you come from Pigments and Bitwig it’s really odd seeing synths with and old fashioned mod matrix and no visual feedback.
Interestingly Bitwig will give that feedback if you create macros with modulators but I wonder if that reduces performance Vs doing it all in the VST.
This … Hive is very friendly to the CPU. It’s very flexible and I like it’s “virtual one knob per function” design. There is no deep menu diving required.
If you like how it sounds, go for it. But don’t expect those convincing analogue sounds, which Diva can create, at a much higher CPU load, of course.
Check out the presets as well. u-he presets are made by pros and often very useful to start with.
U-He really make great stuff and ACE is a hidden gem. It’s one of their cheapest plugins and it’s still getting updates after more than a decade which tells you what kind of company you’re dealing with. Diva is getting on a bit as well but it still comfortably measures up to (and often surpasses) much newer analogue modelling synth plugins. They also don’t have gimmicky sales tactics and other such crap that devalues the brand, they simply charge a fair price for really well designed software that looks and sounds great.
EDIT: Agree that Hive is also great. They basically don’t have any bad products. Hive would probably be my “super synth” of choice - it sounds great, it’s easy to use and it has a massive library of great presets.
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Massive should run smoothely on your machine. Still a very good and powerful synth.
SurgeXT and Vital already mentioned. So many possibilities. Add some decent fx and you should be covered.
Does VCV Rack run smoothely on your PC? Endless sound design possibilities. Vst plugin only in the 99,- pro version, though.
U-He are one of the companies that support CLAP so this should have even better performance on Bitwig.
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Parawave Rapid is a really nice ‘super synth’
Pigments cant be beat for vaue (assuming its on sale, it normaly is!)
Falcon can be your super synth and sampler…
VPS Avenger ‘2’ coming out soon…another contender.
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before giving up the ghost on pigments, it might be worth doing some investigating on your laptop. It is highly probable that there are some microsoft processes running in the background that are using up huge amounts of cpu. check in your task manager and watch the cpu graph for spikes, then take a look in the list for any microsoft processes that flash up on the table of tasks. There may also be other processes running that you dont need.
As previously mentioned… Vital is similar to Serum and it’s free.
Hive is great
Sylenth is great
Surge is free although the UI looks pretty busy.
Just pick one. 
Surge is deep, CPU friendly, sounds great and best of all free.
It also has an extensive presets collection by well-known artists as well as community contributions.
I’ve been doing a bit of research and downloading some demos today.
Results so far:
Dune 3 - Sounds amazing and seems to be very fast and responsive in the UI, sips resources. Huge cinematic sound. UI is a bit retro compared to the others and the lack of visual display on the routing and modulation is probably the biggest issue. Probably the front runner at the moment.
Hive 2 - This is also really fantastic. A bit more modern and polished than Dune in the UI, but doesn’t have the huge cinematic sound. A little more bright and shiny clean sounding, but very inspiring sound if that’s what you are going for. Also absolutely sips resources. The CPU meter barely moves when you add an instance.
Pigments - Much harder on the resources and to my ears doesn’t sound quite as good as Hive or Dune. Fantastic UI and more flexibility though.
Serum - Great for what it does which seems to be more focussed on modern hard type sounds (at least in the presets). Not really what I’m looking for, but I can see why it’s popular. Moderate on resources.
Vital - Absolutely spanked my machine. Uses loads of resources and spikes a lot causing Bitwig to glitch like crazy with one instance just playing a 3 note chord.
Currently trying not to just buy Dune and Hive
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also chews up about 300-400 mb of ram per instance on my machine!!
Just buying Dune and Hive is a great choice. They’re both wonderful VSTs. I use them all the time, and Hive 2 is so well implemented and has a bit of Eurorach function generators as well (Uhe mentioned that their dive down the euro rabbithole led to the new additions to Hive).
I failed to mention Cherry Audio earlier. I was legitimately surprised by how good their stuff sounds.
Also GForce has made the best hardware VST clones I’ve heard, and that includes Arturia’s stuff.
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Your laptop doesn’t seem to have the worst configuration and should be able to run some nice vst’. Perhaps you need to render stems more often than on a modern system. I wonder do you use a external audio interface and how are you’re buffer settings? I mean if you run onboard non asio audiointerfase on low latency you run into high cpu usage way faster then needed. Just a thought
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I’m using an Arturia Mini Fuse with 512 samples of latency with ASIO drivers.
Not sure if that’s a reasonable amount of latency.
…just realized, u are already on bitwig…
so, hey…stop right there…don’t shy away…it’s overwhelming at first…believe me, i know…
been there, too…still am from time to time…and i’ve been around with all this since ages…
so, again, stop right there…and start building, crating from scratch…one step after the other…
tomorrow, u just open a blank bitwig project…take the organ instrument…
copy it’s blank default three times…pick a scale…create one simple low octave motive…
create one mid octave motive and start to use stepmodulators on each of them…
forget about the grid for now…look only at that dead simple organ, fool around with modulators…
see where it takes u…put a fx container behind each instance…fool around with the saturator, with a short and a long delay, a long reverb and short one…drop some filters before OR after…
fool around again…and whenever u hit a sweet spot…bounce THAT…then slice that audio into a drummachine/rack…reverse some of the snippets there and try some note repeaters on these snippets…
and the day after, try the same with one of the other four synth that are waiting in there for u…
and always keep in mind, each of these creations can be copied and run in endless swarm like unison modes, whenever u like…
take it easy and see how many small steps can easily lead u to unbelieveable complexity…
surprise urself…
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If not using a external midi keyboard to record notes that should be ok.
…oh, and 512 samples of latency alone for playing any external keys…!?
oooook, that must be a weird asio setting something issue or ur cpu is really old…
for now, try ur computer keys instead via caps lock…bitwig does’nt mind and for all velocity realtime magic it also offers endless easy options anyways…
make that midi editor/piano roll ur friend…within a few focussed hours u got pretty much that swedish klak klak zak zak workflow thing going…promise.