The Fuel was SGI's mid-range response to customers who only wanted a uniprocessor system, though the 4 GB RAM limit led to fewer sales than would otherwise have been the case, e.g. customers using ANSYS would have preferred at least 8 GB maximum RAM.

Fuel's larger sibling is the SGI Tezro, a system that can have up to four 1 GHz R16000 CPUs with 16 MB L2 each.

While the speeds for these processors may seem low for the time, benchmarks show that for certain specialized tasks that involve small data sets, a Fuel with a 700 MHz R16000 can be equivalent to a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 (e.g. C-Ray).

Using proprietary DDR SDRAM DIMMs, it can be upgraded to a maximum of 4 GB via four slots in two banks.

The mplayer application uses the 3D graphics hardware to accelerate movie playback, giving good support for DivX, MPEG4 and other formats.

In its standard configuration, the Fuel does not come with any audio hardware, although speakers may be attached via a Universal Serial Bus sound card.