CPU Scaling and Performance
Overclocking a high-end processor like the Intel Core i7-2600K doesn't help graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 580 render additional frames in Hard Reset. This suggests that the game is likely more GPU bound.
Above is a screenshot of the Windows Task Manager taken while playing Hard Reset. As you can see just two of the eight available threads on the Core i7-2600K are heavily used. However there are another two threads that are being lightly accessed, while the other 4 remain unused. This would suggest that Hard Rest will play best on a quad-core processor which we are about to confirm.
The above graph tells us that Hard Reset does not play well with dual-core processors. Both the Phenom II X2 560 and Athlon II X2 265 averaged just over 30fps, making them about half as fast as the high-end quad-core processors. In fact the 33fps frame rate of the Phenom II X2 560 was increased to 63fps with the Phenom II X4 980.
Therefore it seems anyone with a modest quad-core processor should have no trouble at all playing Hard Reset. Even the new AMD A6 and A8 series processors did a good job with more than 50fps on average being rendered.