Just bought a Malibal Satori with an ATI 6990m, I7, 8gb ram and 7200rpm drive. Plays ToR at max settings, never dropping below 30fps, which is pretty damn good for a laptop. Btw, as configured it was about $1500.

ATI actually has a good advantage in this game due to having larger memory pools. Check benchmarks at 1920x1080 or higher, I promise you wont see an nvidia card winning. Not a fanboy, I have two comps running intel/nvidia and amd/ati, they were both built to my needs at the time. ATI WILL perform better in swtor. And the 7990, well, anyone who says its not as good as a gtx580 is just plain ignorant. I'm sure nvidia will answer back with something faster for twice the price, but the 7990 is the absolute fastest single gpu card on the market right now, and at the same price as the gtx 580. I am building a system next week actually, and it will be intel 3930/ati 7970, because that is the best I can do on my budget(err, my budget set by my wife) and that is the best platform a person can build for under 2.5k right now.

Sounds driver related to me. Update them recently? I run it on a 2 year old toshiba qosmio laptop with a gts 360m and a 3 year old desktop with an ati 4870. No problems with heat to speak of. Both computers are updated and dusted regularly, running at 1680x945 on the laptop and 1920x1080 on the desktop. (I keep vsync on, as I have never had nor heard of a problem with it)

Have had no lag or dc issues at all, seems like at launch they could probably double server caps. No reason to worry, after people's free play is over it will level out. It's too early to judge the games long-term population, making it too early too judge how many servers are needed.

Programs run as admin are in a seperate memory space than programs without, therefor run both or neither as admin and you should be fine.