At the higher performance end IMO an AlphaPC164 with the highest MHz
cpu you can afford crushes anything intel can afford $/$. The only case
where this might be different is a dual-PPro, which you can get cheaper
than some alpha single CPU systems. Hoever, since NetBSD doesn't do that
yet you'd have to do FreeBSD or Linux.

As best as I can tell, you have to get a 400Mhz PII to match
a 200Mhz PentPro. A 500Mhz AlphaPC164 gives you the same PCI
slots and blows the doors off the intel. Costwise it ain't much
more than a 400Mhz PII system, I believe, nowadays.

Now- in the low to middle end (e.g, 166-300Mhz PII), you will find some
very sweet money deals that the Intels clearly win at. For example,
I just bought a fully loaded 300Mhz PII system (everything *but* the monitor)
for 1195$ + CA tax. But I won't use this for CPU cycle or I/O
intensive applications- I'll still use my 433Mhz PC164, which I bought
from Aspen systems over a year ago  at 2995$ (I'm sure there were
better deals around even then).

It's possible that PPC chips do better, but I've only experienced
the 130Mhz Dual processor RS6000 systems, which seem to perform
as well as a dual 55Mhz Sparc10 in terms of both compute and
I/O.