I used to believe that for Desktops especially that the "ondemand" CPUfrequency changing that kernels included with Ubuntu and Debian based distros have would be sufficient for snappy performance.
However, you can feel the lack of performance on the fastest computer if you have ondemand. A lot of times even under high load 100% of your CPUfrequency in MHz will not be used.
For example a 2.8Ghz CPUmay only run at 1.8MHz or even .9GHz. Now........