The only reasons I spent that kind of money on workstations back then were that I wanted my desktop to be Unix and I wanted good 3D graphics performance. The only way to get those in one compact box was to make a deal with SGI.

These days I get astoundingly better performance than whatever that low volume hardware did back then out of a $700 desktop with a $800 graphics card and a $500 monitor.

$5000 is probably still too high, unless you see the Apple product line as your only option.