How much will computer hardware affect the speed of a "load data local infile" query?
I would like to recommend something with regard to LOAD DATA INFILE:

You need to increase bulk_insert_buffer_size (such as 256M) because a special tree structure is made to accommodate the loading of the data. Even with LOAD DATA INFILE, the tree structure is used when loading data into non-empty tables.

According to the MySQL Docs on bulk_insert_buffer_size:


  MyISAM uses a special tree-like cache to make bulk inserts faster for
  INSERT ... SELECT, INSERT ... VALUES (...), (...), ..., and LOAD DATA
  INFILE when adding data to nonempty tables. This variable limits the
  size of the cache tree in bytes per thread. Setting it to 0 disables
  this optimization. The default value is 8MB.