Jeff Atwood – Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive:

"Incidentally, this is also why failing to outfit your (relatively) highly paid programmers with decent equipment as per the Programmer's Bill of Rights is such a colossal mistake. If a one-time investment of $4,000 on each programmer makes them merely 5% more productive, you'll break even after the first year.

[…] Always try to spend your way out of a performance problem first by throwing faster hardware at it. It'll often be a quicker and cheaper way to resolve immediate performance issues than attempting to code your way out of it. Longer term, of course, you'll do both."