DBCC OPTIMIZER_WHATIF

Derik Hammer shows how to use DBCC OPTIMIZER_WHATIF to get an idea of how your query would run with different hardware:

DBCC OPTIMIZER_WHATIF can be used to pull down your resources or augment them. Often the differences in the execution plans have to do with parallelism and memory grants. This is an example of an execution plan running on an under powered development machine.

This is a good tool to help figure out what an execution plan probably would look like in production when your test environment is much smaller.