Just a newer i5 laptop w\ integrated graphics. I am no where near maxing the CPU on this per task mgr. Internet connection is 25 mbps.
Usually, the bottleneck for a fresh download of the blockchain isn't the bandwidth, it's the seek rate of the harddrive. Since each block must be checked in every way before the client will download the next block, and your CPU isn't hammered, it's probably due to the massive number of disk accesses that both checking the blocks as well as building the index require. If you were to start with a fairly recent copy of the blockchain, from a torrent for example, and tell the client to "rescan" that blockchain, your delays would likely be almost as bad.
