I am not used to seeing my PC go up to 100% usage. I have a
Dell Dem 8400
3gb Ram
8800gt
650 PSU
2 Hard drives 80 and 250gb

I would always brag to my friends that had duel cores on newer PCs that my 3.2 would deff still keep up, and that I wasn't at my 100% CPU usage level. Well I was playing HellGate london, and notice it at 100%! Using NMonitor. Im pretty sure I only remember it being 50%... And now it seems every game I play, old or new is at 100% CPU usage. This can't be good for my PC!! all that processing for long amounts of time!! 8-[

Anyclues?
Thanks
James

Forgot to mention, on idle, CPU is at 0% and 13% ram.

I believe that games are supposed to run the CPU at 100% in order to achieve the best possible performance. Think of it this way: Why would you want your CPU to run at only 50% and render 35 frames per second, while it could run at 100% and render 70fps, assuming that there's no video bottleneck (which there isn't, btw, since you've paired an 8800GT with a P4)?

"This can't be good for my PC!!"
Nah. Running the CPU at 100% for extended amounts of time won't hurt it unless you're severely overvolting it while doing so. Since you've got a Dell, I doubt that you're overvolting it.

I've got my overclocked (but not overvolted) computer running at 100% CPU utilization ten hours a day batch-converting DVDs to the WMV-HD file format while I'm at work. No signs of distress yet.

What's this? No jackbomb-style signature? Weird. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Great thank you for the reply, its just weired Tho. I used to think that the game was maxed out, but only using 50% of my CPU which in my head thought it was great, so I could like multitask like there anit no tomorrow. HA BUT What I did notice is... When using the Music editing software "cakewalk", it used to only use 50%. Now its using 100% (and sometimes the Inet too). And my Ram just chills at 14% ...it idels at 14%...its like my ram went on vaction and is letting the CPU do all the work. Also Just noticed, usually there is a monitor bar in Cakewalk that tells me the % of my CPU and RAM...well its not working anymore...coencidence? WTH is goin on here.

Yes the above posters are right, games are supposted to use 100% of the cpu, which the main exception of which is if you have a dual core cpu however newer games are being programmed to use both (or more) cores giving 100% usage.

and really 3.2GHz is a horrible way to tell the performance of your cpu, for instance a 3.2GHz celeron is a piece of crapbut a 3.2ghz p4 is far better.