Hi Chris.
Of course using the .net ide in a powerful machine helps a lot! But my experience includes working in a 7 years old laptop with an AMD Turion TL-50 processor (nothing to do with the I7 you mention). Also this laptop has a GeForce Go 6100 graphic processor with shared memory. Now the system memory is 4 GBytes, and that's for me the most important for those who want to use PB.NET. For 32bit os 4 GBytes is enough. For 64bit os I would suggest 8 GBytes as you also proposed. Finally I don't believe the .net IDE can utilize more than one processor core, and will use a maximum of 2 GBytes of memory as it's a 32 bit executable! Of course how fast is each core can affect...
Also I want to mention that what we should not compare those IDE's as they do totally diferent things when opening and saving objects. The .net IDE saves every object in its own file (ex: a window is saved in a .srw file and its xaml in a srw.xaml file). The classic IDE saves every object in the pbl where it belongs! Also the classic IDE save the objects compiled, compared to the .net IDE wich save each file in an editable format (if we open a .srw file with notepad we will see powerscript, and if we try to edit a .srd.xaml file with notepad we will see xaml script). As I said before, I don't see a big delay to the .net IDE compared to what I seee in the classic IDE when saving. When opening I see. But there, most delay I see is related to xaml interpretation - load to the designer. If I open an object wich isn't a visual object (like a global function or a nonvisual class - object), things work fast!
Andreas.