Wow!!! That is a blast from the past ... the memories. Back in college (late 90s) I worked in a lab where we had a bunch of SGIs (I think they were O2's) and I was amazed that they could beat (just barely) the PCs running at 5 times (IIRC) the clock rate. We also had a bunch of DEC Alphas (we even had a couple running WinNT, there was a very short period of time where the fastest way to run x86 code was on an emulator on an Alpha) ... it was a sad day when Intel effectively torpedoed the Alpha.
FX32 never run the x86 code faster than native, it did keep optimizing the code but never got in par to the 486 for example.
As for Intel torpedoing the Alpha chip, well, Intel got caught with their pants down with NDAd technology from DEC in their pentium, they "settled" by purchasing DECs IP
Nice thing about the Dec Alpha running NT is that they had Visual Studio that will generate native Alpha code, but only using 32 bits
If you wanted to take advantage, True64 Unix or whatever it was call used the full chip including it's internal 128 bit databus.
Edit: some trivia, the chief architect of Windows NT (WNT) was involved in developing VMS.
So H.A.L is to I.B.M as V.M.S is to W.N.T. maybe an urban legend but funny nevertheless.
As far as SGI O2 are those older than the Indigo series? I don't recall anymore.
I did like SGI motto "we will never build a monochrome system" or something like that.
Still DEC Alpha was the best (computational wise). But for example Allegro by Cadence was a beast on SGI under IRIX.
BTW, any reason there is not a price on the board? or is it one of those that if you must ask you can't afford it?