My internet speed is at leaste a 50mb connection but i think my 5 year old 2.6GHz computer will be holding it back! I thought that less cpu will be used if i ran the program in the terminal without any Gui coding being run!
Bitcoin Core version 0.10+ uses headers-first synchronization and it would allow them to download the blocks simultaneously from various peers. Internet speed isn't a major bottleneck here. The client has to individually verify the blocks to ensure that they are legitimate and the HDD speed would limit the I/O speed.
AFAIK, Bitcoin core 0.11.0 does not benefit Bitcoin Core much in terms of speed. Even though blockchain pruning is partially implemented, the process would still require you to download and verify all the blocks.