CMO on a Laptop

[HardLuck13]

Howdy all.
Time for me a new laptop & was wondering what stats I might look for in a laptop (without buying a full on gaming laptop)? CMO runs great on my desktop system (but it's pretty stout), it really chokes down on my +6 year old laptop, so my desktop has me spoiled with CMO. Not like money is no option, so prob mid-ranged priced or less systems.
Thoughts?

I looked for other topics but didn't see this addressed in the past year or so.
Apologies if I missed something.

-HL

[blond_knight_new]

My five year old dell laptop runs it very well(intel i5 gen7) but Ive upgraded it from the original 8GB to 32GB of RAM for playing DCS.

[thewood1]

I only play on a laptop. I have two. Both i9s. If all you play is CMO, get a laptop with a desktop CPU in Intel speak, thats something without an H at the end. CPU speed is more important than number of cores, but cores can help performance. The second consideration is cooling or thermal performance. Most laptop review sites will mention cooling at load. If you play a lot of monster scenarios at high acceleration, cooling is extra important or else you'll find yourself with thermal throttling that'll waste a lot of potential.

Budget - something with an i5.
$1200-$2000 - an i7 with a good graphics card
>$2000 - a top end i7 or i9 and a very good 3000 series nVidia.

They will all play CMO well. But low-end ones will be slower on large scenarios.

[JFS737]

Hi,
I have an MSI Pulse GL66... it is 3 years old or so and has a laptop CPU that's an i7 (11800H) and 16GB of DDR4 memory with a 500 GB SSD. Graphics not likely important but 3060 laptop version, it runs a 4k secondary monitor pretty easily. The laptop is very fast (load CMO on the SSD). I would think you could get one of these used for under $600 in good shape and maybe cheaper on ebay. They also make them new with gen 12 and likely soon gen 13 CPU's and faster SSD's and graphics for more money. 15.6 inch screen and HDMI or cast to a second monitor up to 4k.

[HardLuck13]

Appreciate it guys.
I'm more of a wargamer, so graphics are not really an issue with this laptop. CMO will prob be the max I run on it, then web stuff & other rather mundane apps. I've got the muscle with the desktop if need be, just like to make CMO mobile on a new utility type laptop.

This helps & gets me pointed in the right direction.
Thanx again.
-HL

[thewood1]

Frankly, I've gotten CMO to run on bare bones 8" windows tablet. It runs small scenarios like Battle of Latakia very well. It'll run some medium scenarios around 1:1 and 2:1. So as long as you stay with an i5 and above, you could even handle some large scenarios at decent time ratios. If you use Tacview at all, the GPU will matter.

[Craigkn]

Just to riff off of this - what is the optimal RAM for CMO? I am currently running 16gb on a new (less than a year old) computer and feel its pretty slow..

[thewood1]

RAM should never be an issue in a semi-modern PC. CMO is still a 32-bit app, as far as I know. I have a laptop with 8Gb that runs CMO no issues.