Nowdays you can purchase that machine on the second hand market for something like $200-$300.
They are measurably faster than even contemporary laptops though plus you often get ECC ram and raid disk setups and the good old Xeon didn't used to ramp up and down in speed, it just ran fast all the time. I'd still characterise that as a beast, especially on $/performance terms (although the power consumption is a worry).
Xeon covers a pretty wide variety of chips. Of course, the Pentium II Xeons didn't have speedstep either. 12-core tells us either fairly high end but older or kind of medium-low but newer. Dual socket tells us not the really low end Xeon that shares a socket (and probably a lot more) with the high end enthusiast desktop chips.
They are measurably faster than even contemporary laptops though plus you often get ECC ram and raid disk setups and the good old Xeon didn't used to ramp up and down in speed, it just ran fast all the time. I'd still characterise that as a beast, especially on $/performance terms (although the power consumption is a worry).