At my university I asked about these flashy new machines which I'd never have a chance to use, I was told they were slow. That was way back then.
Edit: Things were moving pretty fast at the time, so I suppose if you bought one in 1998, it would have looked anemic when the 486 came out. Basically, if you bought anything and held it for 3-5 years, it was much further behind than the same situation today.
1998's high end PC would have been a Pentium II 450MHz with 128MB of RAM, 10GB HD, and a NVIDIA card.
The 386/33 was high end in 1990