The SS5 is probably about as powerful as a fast Pentium or slow Pentium II, although that's really comparing apples and oranges

Perhaps it was just the windowing interface we were using at the time (some Sun thing on top of X), but my lasting memory of the SS5 from uni was that they were painfully slow (even we some mech eng student hadn't left 10 finite element jobs running in the background). I had a 486dx4 100 at the time running Linux which always seemed much faster than the Sparc.

I did like them though, nice solid bits of hardware, they also had Sun Trintron monitors on them (those were the first Trintrons I saw and I haven't stopped using Trinitrons since).