Sorry to bother everyone with this, but i could do with a little impartial advice before conisdering a purchase.

Im very much into real-time graphics using OpenGL, specifically to create 'Virtual Heitage' applications. These applications feature models and environments with close to millions of polygons. At the moment i use my laptop and a rather slow desktop for testing which, as you can imagine, is far from ideal. I've been eyeing up these SGI workstations recently (eg. Octane 2, Indigo, 02 etc), and i know that these are used by university teams, who make similar graphical visualisations, that these are the thing to use.

But i'm confused. They must be good, but when i look at the specs they don't seem particularly powerfull when compared to a brand new PC with , and some seem to be behind concerning OpenGL implementations (although i expect parts can be upgraded).

So are these actually as good as they are supposed to be for running graphical visualisations, and are they worth the investment ?