This post is for those asking about system upgrades. My friend decided he wanted to get his 16 year daughter (who is a gamer) into SWTOR as she decided she liked it. She's weird in what she likes and doesn't sometimes, but decided she wanted to play. Her system was a dell Core2duo system that I had stuck a ati 5550 in it because it was basically the most powerful video card I could fit into that proprietary piece of junk they bought for her. The video card did well for games like League of Legends, but couldn't handle SWTOR.
So her dad in his infinite wisdom thought to try and get some more performance by messing with settings. He went into the Catalyst Control Setup and went to the performance/overclocking tab. He had no idea he was overclocking the card and those cards do not overclock for crap. So he slid the sliders all the way up. Which proceeded to fry both the video card and the junky PSU in that dell. Since dell motherboards and PSUs are proprietary pieces of crap, he couldn't replace the PSU with an off the shelf one. Which was the original reason we couldn't put anything bigger as a video card into the system. So he finally took my advice and broke down to ordering the parts needed for a real system.
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So here is what I recommended he buy to play SWTOR on a tight budget ***
$70ish Intel G620 (sandy bridge dual core):
Amazon Listing or
Newegg Listing
$23ish Good but inexpensive socket 1155 heatsink:
Amazon Cooler Master Hyper 212+ or
Newegg Sunbeam Twister
$55ish Inexpensive H61 micro ATX socket 1155 board:
Amazon Gigabyte board or
Newegg Biostar board
$30ish Inexpensive DDR3 8Gb (2 x 4GB) memory:
Amazon KomputerBay or
Newegg Team Elite
$160ish Ati 6870 Video card:
Amazon with a Sapphrie Brand or
Newegg Powercolor brand
$60ish Least expensive good brand 80+ certified power supply:
Amazon Corsair brand or
Newegg Seasonic brand
This setup assumes you have a case, optical DVD drive, and hard drive already as my friend has. He got a little bit more as a couple of items were on newegg's Shell Shocker deals so he saved about $50 or so more than the prices in the links above total on his purchase.
Basically $350 got his daughter a kickass system which he claims runs the game better than his current system. Which is an overclocked 3.6Ghz Q6600, 6GB of ram, and a 4970x2 video card. His system, while older, it isn't bad. His system runs the game pretty good actually. However, the new system for his daughter runs it even better. This is great considering the cheap price.