I hear what you are saying with not having a great comparison, but I really think the hardware is not the issue.

the reason I think that is because

A) the performance...

I have run full Maintenance plans rebuilding indexes and stats, have even restarted the sql instance

have also tried running query with RECOMPILE so don't think its a cached plan issue

Thanks for the ideas guys,

I neglected one important piece of info. The development workstations are running sql 2008, database is in 2005 mode

production servers(I've tested 3 different ones are various...