As for much faster, I wouldn't know, as it depends on a number of other
parameters as well (e.g. hard drive speed, available RAM).

As for capability: VS 2003 - no. VS 2005 - yes (in a somewhat limited way).
To be technically correct though, the compiler (CL) isn't capable of
compiling several files at once, the development environment instead spawns
several instances of the compiler.

It is possible to setup the maximum number of parallel builds in VS 2005
(default to number of logical(?) execution units AFAIK), but files in the
same project are never compiled in parallel. It looks like each project is
assigned an id during compilation, and that only files in different projects
are compiled in parallel, unfortunately.

There are other build tools out there that support "full" parallel builds
using the VC compilers, e.g. Boost.Build (-j<parallel compiles> option).

HTH // Johan