Ah, well... the "poor man" aspect of it comes in to play when you consider that PURE won't make a low to mid-range CPU and GPU cry like SupCom does.
Actually, I have a several year old dual-core AMD, I think 2 gig cores, which is very "mid/lower-mid range" these days. I dumped 4 gigs of memory into it, and the only "high end" purchase was a 4870 video card.
Supreme Commander runs like glass now. I suspect that the video card was a moderate bottleneck, but the memory was the big one.