Does SpatialAnalyzer ever run worth a damn?

Our workstations at the shop are old, and SA has always been a laggy POS with any model with more than a couple hundred surfaces. If you get close to a 1000, it just turns into a slideshow. I've had matrix transformations take 20 minutes before for a simple attempt to fit to two lines and a plane. Does it run like this on all hardware, or would new machines actually help? I know some software is just slow and shit no matter how much power you throw at it.