only got a dual core laptop, am i screwed?

[bluejeans]

I was on vacation for a couple of weeks and decided to pay $AUD700 for a laptop that would cost about 1200 here. It's an i5 3230 2.6/3.2 with turboboost and a radeon 7670m. i7's were about $200 extra, and that was only with a geforce 640m - and in most cases the clock speeds of the i7's were even lower than my i5. I'm a bit concerned about only having two cores (remember, i5 laptops are only dual core), is having a quad going to improve framerates by something like 50% or more? At least I knew that getting a decent gpu was important.

[The Old Refuge]

you're not screwed actually having higher clock will help you more than using MTVU ( 3 cores ) unless the game really get benefit from it

overall higher clock usually will help better overall

[Koji]

I have an older i5 dual core laptop that I often play PCSX2 on, most games play pretty well (it only has a 540M) at 2x. That laptop will do even better than that, just expect some games to not perform perfectly. Most of the simpler 3D RPGs especially (persona 3/4, TotA) I can confirm will run perfectly well.

[Rezard]

That's a pretty good laptop for most emulation.

Good call with the decent GPU, too.
It's kinda hard to come up with a modern Core i that won't at least do decently.
Even the low-power i5 have Turbos that would give surprising results.