I'd like to preface this review with the note that I've never actually used the 8100. I actually ordered one, but after doing additional research, decided it to be a bad idea and canceled the order (after waiting for 2 hours listening to lousy Christmas music). I canceled my order because the 8100 just doesn't live up to what it seems to promise.

In order to make the system worthwhile (you don't purchase a Ferrari and ask for cloth seats and an AM only radio), one has totally ignore the presets that the Dell marketing department came up with to make the system cheap enough to appeal to the average Joe. First replace the PC-600 RDRAM with PC-800 RDRAM, or else your P4 will become so horribly bogged down by the RAM that any gains in performance you might have seen from getting a P4 in the first place will be lost. Next, replace the "noname" monitor with the Trinitron, to ensure you're getting a quality monitor. Third, toss out the TNT2, and criticize Dell for trying to offload the video cards that've been sitting in the back of their warehouses for a year because nobody would buy them when they initially launched. Finally, choose a decent pair of speakers, unless of course you like that "tin can" timbre of the bargain basement speakers Dell is trying to pawn off on you. There, now you've got a system with decent components.

So let's examine what you've got. You've bumped the price up to at least $2500. But how well does the foundation of this system, the Pentium 4 processor, really work? Not very well, according to Tom's Hardware Review (www.tomshardware.com), an independent website devoted to examining computer hardware, and most other independent reviewers. The P4 processor lacks a well implemented Floating Point Unit, which means that any program that does hard core math, say MPEG4 encoding or graphics applications, will perform miserably. In fact, the P4 is slower than the Pentium III when processing requires use of the FPU. The P4 is also not as good at running business applications, such as Word or Excel, as an Athlon or Pentium III based system. All of this, it seems, is despite the P4's advantages in bus speed and ram capabilities. Where does that leave you? With a $2500 computer that performs about as well at most of the things you'll do everyday as a cheaper Athlon or Pentium III based system.

There are some cases where the P4 truly shines when compared to Athlon or PIII systems, and that is running games that have taken advantage of the SSE optimizations the card offers. If future game and software developers make full use of SSE and SSE2, the P4 might actually become more useful than an Athlon or PIII system, but, unfortunately, such is not the case now. There can be no justification for purchasing this Dell system, or any other P4 based system, given the lackluster performance the processor has demonstrated in benchmark tests. I strongly suggest that you instead seek out an Athlon or PIII system to fulfill your computer needs.



Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): Varies by Configuration
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-ROM
Hard Drive (GB): 31-40