Believe them. I have a PC which is still quite new (top end Dell), my gf has a PoS Tiny starter build. Want to guess which runs ToEE better? As Lord Spike says, tweak and fiddle for better performance. I've only ever seen Liv claim to get no lag whatsoever and, as Gaear said, she must have had a Kray in her basement. :transform
I run this game on a laptop with a 32MB NVidia Card and 512MB Ram. I hardly got any lag and had no problems at all until I got to the fire temple and nodes..and at that point it's not that I get lag, it's just that the game freezes on me...a LOT. But even though it get's really frustrating when your game freezes half way through the Balor battle your finally winning, it's most definitely worth it once you see the bastard explode...took my polar bear with him though..
Polar bears are particularly susceptable to fire creatures, for obvious reasons. In fact, the Eskimo name for the Balor translates as "big bastard bear-bane".