Supreme commander C2D?

Are games like SupCom, C&C3 and other RTS games more geared towards Quad Cores? I'm wondering whether a $150 more for a laptop (upgrading dual to quad) will make a huge difference. It will have a 260M GPU.

 

SupCom is for sure a game that you want a quad for.

C&C3 can do without, as most other RTS games can also. No reason to not get a quad though, its more future ready and more games are going to be taking full advantage of them as time passes.

 

Yes get the Q9000 at least. Is this an M860ETU?

 

For single player missions a decent C2D (2.8ghz+) is plenty. For multiplayer skirmishes its another matter. Definitely get the the quad and future proof yourself in the process.

 

I get over 70 fps in Supreme Commander on my NP8662 that has the Q9000 but when I first ran it, it wasn't making much use of all cores until I used this tool called Core Maximiser. After this I noticed better frame rates.

Before this I was experiencing slow downs.

C&C3 is capped to 30 fps and a C2D is enough. There may be a way to remove the fps cap by hex editing or patching but I haven't investigated this yet.

Like others have said, having the Q9000 will give you overall good performance. Just check out my thread detailing gaming performance and you will see:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=387976

 

Ah okay, I was thinking of getting an Asus G51 from BB but it seems like I should wait a little longer and get a Quad Core version of either G71 or G51.

On a side note, is SupCom FA better than SupCom? I saw a lot of people complaining about the after support for FA.

 

While performance will increase with a Quad over a Dual (of the same clock speed) you're not going to see huge gains because of the way SC splits up the threads. It has 4 threads, and only 2 are very intensive, the other two are audio processing and the like, which when combined stress the cpu less than either of the other threads. You're better off getting a faster Dual Core than a slower Quad if all you intend to do is game. There arent many games that will take advantage of quad cores and those that do dont do a great job like SC.

As for FA vs SC I like the balancing and multi-player options in FA MUCH more than in SC. As for support, there are several patches out for FA already so I think it's safe to say that the support is present. I havnt had any problems with FA so I think what they're doing is sufficiant.