BTW...
If performance is important to you - check the performance of the disks.
Are you using SANs ? SANs are usually overloaded and can yield poor performance.
We have SAN's here which vary between 1ms per page read and 15ms per page read.
That means that the same query on the same hardware can take 15 times longer on one machine than the other.
Clear the cache and run some selects with set statistics io, time on and see the time to read 1 page
(Disks work in IOPS not BPS). If you're using SANs run throughout the day - you'll find slow times and fast times.
We've investigated alls sort of tuning measure (compression, 16k pages, partitioning, re-indexing, config tuning, syslog on separate cache, tempdb conf, multiple tempdbs, etec) and the most useful was simply to buy a machine with 3 times more RAM.
Not suggesting that the same will apply to everyone but I generally work in places with lots of data.