AlphaServers were not exactly as inexpensive as the Intel systems in those examples. The Alpha had a huge disadvantage in that low cost motherboards were hard to come by, and those that were available actually did tend to kill its performance.

There were certain kinds of benchmarks (including some in SPECcpu) that really favoured CPU's with 64-bit fixed point arithmetic, but if you left those out, it wasn't even a contest. Even when you left them in, the Alpha systems had a hard time justifying themselves for people who weren't doing floating point work.