Is anybody here very familiar with the 3 year old Dell Dimension 8100?

Ask away.
T

no but am familair with dell
ask away

/compfixer101

Errrrr...... there's a whole lot of question missing here.....

PS this is me getting back to you    :-/

I'm trying to see if I can upgrade this computer so that it can play awesome PC games of now. I believe now ( don't actually remember ) it has a 1.5ghz intel, 256ram, 64mb Geforce Ultra, DVD drive but no sound card. Do you think that this is sufficient to play games that require a lot of power and great graphics? Games like Halo, Lifeforce, Doom3 , Quake etc etc. Or should I upgrade the computer? And if so, CAN it be upgraded?

All parts can be upgraded.

What you have now is OK, remember the biggest part of gaming workload on a PC is the graphics - a good card takes the load off the rest of the system.

Try trimming your OS - ie if it's XP, lose the fade menu's and other frills. No wallpaper/backgrounds, as few desktop icons as possible - ditch all the fancy fonts. Have as little in the tray as possible.

Then look at tweaking your hardware. Clean the heatsink of crud, apply new paste. get a grphics card tweak program and squeeze 5 or 10 million cycles out of it. maximise your BIOS, clock your CPU a bit... oh Intel  :-(

download all the latest drivers, format your drive and reinstall your OS and keep deffraging it........

You can spend a small fortune (I did) and have the bees knees for 4 months or you can save yer dosh and just work with what you have, which is no slug btw

So I what I got right now is OK? 1.5 ghz intel is fast enough for todays high powered games? I'm sure that 64mb card isn't enough. What card do you recommend that is really good but without really burning a whole in my wallet? BTW...I would need a card that has a DVI input since I have an Apple 20inch wide screen display. And (if there's such a thing), I would need a card that is able to display games in widescreen view. Do you happen to know of any video cards like this? And do you think that 256ram is Ok? Or should I up to at least 512? As for sound card and sourround sound speakers? What do you suggest?

512Mb of RAM would benefit the system.

I have a GF4Ti4600 that cost the earth a few years back, but you can pick them up for around 100 quid now :-(  It has VIVO, DVI connector, and monitor out... dunno about digital Video in, your monitor only needs SVGA out - the standard connector.... you sure ya don't mean like video composite or S-Video? anyhow this one will do that too and display to 2 screens and make my toast... errr... ahem.

Haven't found a game my GF4 and XP1800 can't handle yet... it'll come though.

I'd stick with your GF Ultra for now and have a good scan around - wait untill the games become unplayable on your system rather than pre-emping them by unnecesarilly updating your system.

Sound - well unless yer hooking it into your hi-fi and you have those godawfull desktop spkrs - then the SBlaster live is great value, but splash out and get the varant where it plugs in at the front of your PC. My advice - buy a secondhand AMP and a pair of decent speakers to get the full value of the SB cards

buy a secondhand AMP and a pair of decent speakers to get the full value of the SB cards

What do you mean by this???

I just want to be able to play the games with AWESOME graphics, and great speed. Nothing to slow down anything. I want good sound. But most importantly...is there a video card that can display games in widescreen mode?