Is this cpu good enough to run recent games?
 

I’m thinking of getting an Acer Aspire AS5551G-4591 laptop.

It has an AMD Turion II Dual-Core P520(2.3GHz) CPU, 4 gb ddr3 ram, and it has a dedicated ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 graphics card which has 1 gb ddr3 ram (I checked the benchmarks and it can run recent games on at least medium settings). Does the cpu speed even matter? What about on low or medium settings? I’m talking about games like battlefield 2 bad company, crysis etc.

I'd argue video cards and RAM are more important than CPU speed for games. Dedicated sound cards help too, though it's probably not an option for laptops.

You should still be fine though.

Dedicated sound cards haven't been an issue for awhile now due to how little non-dedicated require to run. I do agree that video and ram are important, which is a tough one on laptops, since pretty much every laptop video card shares some of the RAM with the system (if you go into the system properties, you'll see like 768 dedicated, 256 shared, for 1gb of ram for example).

Regardless, that should be OK for running most games.

Crysis is also a highly tweakable title and you can get somewhat decent performance out of a lot of lesser hardware if you grab or create the right config.

There are TONNES of these configs floating around on the intertube, so go find a good one.

I'm not sure about medium or low settings on BC2 but I play on high (DX9) and saw a significant increase in performance by going from an AMD 7850 X2 @2.8Ghz to an AMD 945 X4 @3.0GHz on my desktop computer. Keeping the video card and all other important hardware the same, upgrading the CPU brought me from 30-35ish FPS in most situations to being capped out at 60FPS (vsync) in most situations. Lots of other people have reported similar results in EA's BC2 forums, the game seems to be really CPU heavy, getting bottlenecked by a lot of dual core CPUs.