I also have a small render farm at work, it was only two 8core machines when I started, but every time a machine needs upgraded in the building I push for it to get a good CPU so it can be networked up at night and weekends. We have a couple of beefy machines for video editing so the last upgrade I got to put the old ones on the farm, made a huge difference.
What hardware do you use?
For work machines we now run i7s, 32 GB of memory, whatever GPU sounds good at the time of order (Titan being our nicest), and generally nice parts. Mostly Dell 27" and 30" UltraSharp monitors, but also the Wacom Cintiqs.
And we DID have a hardware forum but I guess it was killed off.
I create and test on my low performance laptops because the two simulators that I use are expected to run very well on all kinds of hardware for Windows. This suits me fine because I multi-task at letting something run on one PC while I work on the other. In this way of multi-tasking, the low performance does not really hurt my progress but actually forces me to be better at multi-tasking than I would otherwise be. I work on art content while the other computer is crunching a job. Besides that, I actually do an extreme wide variety of tasks - more than most people in this industry - so performance is secondary and multi-tasking is primary with two or more devices. Since I can't afford the high priced hardware, multi-tasking is keeping me moving forward.
However, usually the higher the performance of the computers, for most people, then the more gets done in performance demanding tasks such as compiling, copying, rendering, and so forth. It has the potential to be a huge time saver but it depends on the types of tasks that you do. Some artists don't care because they are creating the art while they are at the computer but do tasks such as rendering when they leave the computer (Rendering can sometimes take all night, so this is a good time to sleep! 
).
Maybe a strange thought, but for some roles in development it might be even better to not have the quickest stuff out there. Thinking about the fact that you want to push the limits and also let your game run on a GPU which doesn't cost 400+ USD etc.?
Maybe a strange thought, but for some roles in development it might be even better to not have the quickest stuff out there.
Correct. Not everyone needs the greatest high-end machines to do their job.
Designers, producers, and other positions generally need much less powerful machines than other roles. Laptops in the $600-1200 range are fairly common as they go back and forth to meetings; these machines are powerful enough to play the games, but not powerful enough for the high-end settings. Groups like HR and the front desk can have machines as a hand-me-down. If you are blessed to have a significant QA group, they can serve as an IT dumping ground.
In my experience, the mega-developers -- the few highly-favored programming leads, tech leads, and art leads -- are given frequent hardware updates. Their machines that are replaced every 1-2 years are handed down to the grunts. The not-quite-top developers also get new machines about every 3-4 years. The common artist and common programmer get secondhand machines that are still rather nice, but not new. Q6600 and Q7700 boxes are still floating around, but most people have newer boxes.
Right, you don't need the kind of rig that LAN-partiers would be jealous of to do game development. When I pick out my home machine for hobby game dev and personal use, I generally build a spec based on two things: Supported features and cost-curve. The last machine I built (within the last year) is a Haswell i7 4770 with 16GB RAM, a Radeon 290X and a Samsung Evo 830 Pro 256GB SSD backed by two 1TB laptop hard drives that I use Windows 8 storage spaces on to provide mirrored and non-mirrored space. I dual-boot the same machine in Linux having a 128GB SSD to boot and two mirrored 750 GB laptop drives for storage.
All of the relevant components are the most-modern architecture, but generally are not the biggest and baddest available. You generally only get 10-15% performance benefit at best, for 50% extra cost (or even more for the highest end CPUs). Its not worth it. I splurged on the 290x last time because it doubles as a gaming rig, I wanted a GCN 1.1/Mantle card, and because I actually got it at MSRP before the prices went sky-high from litecoin miners (and I've been mining on it myself to further reduce its effective cost). I do have a personal policy of maxing out my system RAM in new builds -- mostly because I've never not done it before I was done with the machine, and it can be hard to match modules years later and it'll probably cost just as much if you end up putting in a whole new set. Technically you don't have to match modules these days (though its still better), but for my money I'd rather just be done with it and enjoy the benefits for the entire life of the system.
Intel core i5, 12 gb RAM, 500W PSU, 500gb of baracuda HD storage. Only came to about 600 USD brand new and works like a charm for everything I need to do.
Before this I was running an athlon x2 with 4gb of DDR2 and it was fairly ok for most things, although I couldn't listen to music and write code at the same time.
I've been using this dell 24" monitor for a few months in combo with an older 17" one and it works for fine, no need for IPS or a touchscreen or any of that fancy jazz.
Touch screens aren't really that useful for software development, but I could imagine using a wacom tablet for making graphics.
CPU: i5 4670k @ 4Ghz
GPU: NVIDIA EVGA 760 4GB
RAM: 4 x 8GB @ 1600mhz
HDD: 2TB
Motherboard: MSI Z87-G55
PSU: Corsair 750
I got my current system in early 2011 at just below the high-end increase in cost. Apart from upgrading the GPU recently to a R9 290 and regularly adding more SSD's for storage, I have seen very little reason to upgrade.. as even the very high end CPU/RAM available today isn't that much faster, except possibly for some specialized tasks that I don't do anyway.
Hoping for some good stuff to come along from Intel after the summer to warrant an upgrade, along with PCI-Express SSDs.
I feel proper hardware is extremely important, perhaps monitors especially.
I worked for a company in 2012 where they actually did a study evaluating whether to switch to SSD's. They determined that after the first rebuild of the project (which took like 2 hours), Linux would have cached most of the files in RAM and the second rebuild took the same amount of time with HDD and SSD, so there was no reason to upgrade (?).
I routinely watched the desktop background redraw scanline by scanline when switching programs at that place. Also, we had to use a VM as we could only build on Linux but only use Outlook etc on Windows. In addition I was given a single monitor at 1650 x 1080, though I managed to get another one after I filed an issue with the main HQ tech support. They sent one from another country and it took 2.5 months to arrive.
Suffice to say I don't particularly miss it. At least everyone there was very nice, and I never felt much pressure to overwork myself :)
current PC:
CPU: Phenom II X4 @ 3.4 GHz
GPU: Radeon R7850 / 7850 HD
RAM: 4x4 GB, PC3-1060
HDD: 5TB (1+1+3)
MOBO: ? I forget (BioStar something-or-another)
PSU: Corsair 600
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