Upgrading HP desktop

[sjm80]

A friend of mine is desperate to play swtor with his old PC

Its an HP Pavilion a6655f
Amd Phenom X4 9150e Quad Core
5gb ram
Nvidia Geforce 6159se
300w power supply
640gb HD

I have an 8800 gt sitting in my closet but im pretty sure that 300w power supply isnt enough.

If he buys a better psu and i put in the 8800 gt. Any idea what kind of performance that will give him?

I could try without the psu to at least see what the performance is like but dont want to mess up the system.

Any Ideas?

 

[g-unit1111]

The CPU is OK but the rest of the build might be way out of date to play SWTOR.

If he's that desperate to hang onto that PC he should definitely upgrade the PSU. Here's a great low cost one that will give you a significant boost (if the mixed reviews are a red flag I use the 430W version in an HTPC and it's been problem free for nearly 5 months now). The bad thing about HP is that they don't use standard form factors which in some cases is near impossible to upgrade but this should work:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139028

 

[sjm80]

So i went ahead and bought the Corsair 430w and the installation of that and the card worked great. A fresh install of windows 7 and drivers all went fine.

However, once i started gaming some problems began. Everything ran much better than i thought but the games started freezing the computer after a lil bit. I have the fan working with rivatuner so it goes up to 100% in high load.

There were never any artifacts on the screen. Just suddenly freeze and I would have to reboot it myself.

I turned the logging on in rivatuner but of course it hasnt happened since then. I actually thought it might be ok but it happened when i turned it on this morning and jumped into a game (froze in 2 mins) and i didnt have the logging on .


Anywho. Any Ideas? The Vid card heat generally gets to around 70ish. Only seen it as High as 75. Maybe its no good? I used it for 2 1/2 years and then it sat in my closet for at least another year.

Could it be the PSU? Anyway to tell?