What's my bottleneck?

So I finally got caught up reading this entire thread...I'm sorry the OP had to put up with so much crap. First Lion says it is SWTOR and not the OPs hardware...Lion says you need 4Gb minimum, OP clearly said he had only 3Gb, Lion still argues with OP that he doesn't need to change anything and calling logic fails. Lion says his friends computer that matches his exactly except for a slower video card actually runs smoother.

I'll tell you this Mr/Ms. Lion, sounds like something might be wrong with YOUR system and instead of giving crappy advice to other people you should get your own situation fixed.

OP if you are using 3x 1g sticks that is definitely hurting you, on your motherboard 2 of the slots she be marked in some way, usually color coded to show where to identical ram sticks to run in dual channel mode, which means you have 2 direct pipelines to the CPU instead of 1. So you typically buy in pairs (unless you are using an oddball triple channel chipset).

Also when buying ram, don't buy what is labeled as the fastest Mhz or Ghz speed. IF you're not overclocking you don't need that as it ties in with the CPU multipliers and stuff I won't get into here. Typically the faster the Ghz the slower CAS Latency you will find on the ram. So if you're not into overclocking, you should find ram that matches the bus speed of your motherboard/cpu for best performance.

He had 8GB in one of the machines

You should also make sure you know what RAM your motherboard can take. If it can only handle DDR2 RAM you don't want to get something that's DDR3.

Oh yeah I agree with you, it probably is drivers/firmware on the different machines. And i am no expert by any means.
But it seems like with game engines some work better with a variety of drivers/firmware and some dont.
TOR engine maybe just does not work as well with such a large variety of drivers/firmware as some others. And how does one fix that on the user end? If its grafix drivers sure, but what if its firmware on something obscure, or a soundcard issue, ect.
One with a high performance system buys a product and naturally assumes it will work well with that system. Maybe they shouldnt, but they do.

If it can only take DDR2 he might as well change Motherboard, CPU and RAM. DDR3 is alot cheaper than DDR2 (atlast in Norway) coz DDR2 isn't produced anymore.

I remember when DDR1 came after SDRam, then EDO that was before that was insanly expensive since it wasn't produced anymore. You got 4x DDR1-266Mhz for the price of 1x EDO-66Mhz.

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_AM2Plus/M3A/

^ that's my mother board.

Currently I have 3 DDR 2 800 (400 MHz) installed. Mobo is rated for DDR 2 1066.

Should I get two of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148286

And leave two of my current sticks installed (in the color coded slots) or will that hurt me?

In a perfect world, you really should just get a new mobo/cpu/memory. Being imperfect, you can probably spend a bit to get minimal performance increase. Definately add the stick of memory, It'll cut down on the paging to the hard drive which would be a huge help. Also, you may want to consider trying Readyboost if you have usb 2.0, not sure if it lives up to the hype, but it would be cheap and something worth trying. Just make sure the usb drive is fast.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/m.../ff356869.aspx

NEWEGG.com has DDR2 everywhere and very cheap. 4gb G skill ddr2 800 for $46 bucks. Not sure about overseas, but in US RAM is easy to find and cheap on newegg and tigerdirect.com

Many games have problems with the I7? I donot think so. Some maybe...but "many" is not true. I have a I7 and it runs all the games I have tried flawlessly. If a player should run into a issue, you can disable Hyperthreading in the system bios. Now for the money difference versus performance, I would agree the I5 is a better buy.

It may be that you will have to OC the RAM to get that 1066 speed. If you know how then buy it, if not buy the 4gb G Skill off newegg for $46 bucks IMO, its ddr2 800 which is what you have now.