Re: Is this gaming laptop good for playing sims 4

@gabbymck1028  Inventory is pretty sparse this year, in large part because so many people bought gaming laptops for "work" when the lockdown started.  So if you wait until Black Friday itself, you may miss out on the best deals, or even the only really good ones.

If you'd like more suggestions right now, let me know, and I'll be happy to look.  But there's not much of a point in searching until the day you're ready to buy, or close enough, since sales and inventory are changing so quickly.

Please also let me know your preferred price range, as welll as any other details that matter to you, or any other games you'd like to be able to play.

I would appreciate your help on more suggestions and have you look for I've looked into other laptops like MSI and Asus as well. For the past year I've saved up $1500 for a gaming laptop but not sure if I really wanna spend that much and other games I would like to play would be Apex as well as GTA if possible. 

@gabbymck1028  Sims 4 isn't really the determining factor here, other than adding to the required hard drive space you'll want to store it.  GTA 5 isn't all that demanding by modern standards either.  Apex Legends would benefit from up to an Nvidia 2060, which is more than the other games need but still well within your budget.

However, the as-yet-unreleased GTA 6 may be an entirely different matter.  Its estimated recommended specs range from a 2060 to a 1080 ti or 2080, although you obviously wouldn't need to play on high settings to have fun with the game.  The estimated processing power is also high, so you'd want an i7-10750H, the year-older i7-9750H, or a Ryzen 7 4800H.

So the question is, do you want the extra power of an Nvidia 2070, bringing you closer to your $1,500 budget, or are you fine with a significantly cheaper 2060?  There are also Max-Q variants, which are designed to be more efficient and thereby run cooler, but they end up being significantly slower.  To give you an idea of relative speed:

• 2060 Max-Q: ~90%
• 2060 Mobile: 100%
• 2070 Max-Q: ~100%
• 2070 Mobile: ~120%
• 2070 Super Max-Q: ~120%

Point is, the major decision you have to make is how fast you want your graphics card to be, and you can go from there.

You could certainly get a laptop with a 2070 for within your budget.  There are a few different good options I found for $1,500 or under, all of which have the same 10750H processor and 16 GB RAM.  This MSI has more storage than the others, with a 512 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD, and is on sale for $1,400 with an additional $100 rebate:

https://www.newegg.com/black-msi-gl-series-gl75-10sfk-029-gaming-entertainment/p/N82E16834155401

This Dell is $1,322 with a 512 GB SSD:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/member/shop/gaming-laptops/dell-g5-15-gaming-laptop/spd/g-series-15-5500-laptop/gn5500ehwkh

This Asus ROG STRIX comes with an SSD that's either 512 GB SSD ($1,350) or 1 TB ($1,450):

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Asus-ROG-G512-Strix-i7-RTX-2070-16GB-512GB-Gaming-Laptop/921522949

https://www.newegg.com/rog-strix-g15-black-asus-g512lw-es76-gaming-entertainment/p/N82E16834235464

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1566513-REG/asus_g512lw_es76_i7_10750h_8gb_1tb_ssd_rtx2070_w10h_15_6.html

This Gigabyte Aero is a very highly rated laptop and has a 2070 Super Max-Q, and it's $1,500:

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16834233313?Item=N82E16834233313

There are plenty of differences among the laptops, for example the MSI is noisier than the others, while the Dell loses a couple percentage points in gaming performance.  If you want more information about certain details, just ask.

If you'd rather go with an Nvidia 2060, there are even more options in your price range, although above $1,300, you'd probably want to get a model with a 2070 instead.  These three laptops are among the best-rated cheap (i.e. not $2,000) gaming laptops available.  The Asus is the cheapest good option, at $1,000, with a Ryzen 7 4800H that's not as fast in gaming as a 10750H but is still quite good:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-15-6-laptop-amd-ryzen-7-8gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2060-512gb-ssd-fortress-gray/6408464.p?skuId=6408464

This Lenovo Legion is $1,130 and has a 1 TB SSD; this Gigabyte Aorus is $1,150 and has a 512 GB SSD.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1543440-REG/lenovo_81y60004us_15_6_legion_5_gaming.html

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16834725086?Item=N82E16834725086

If you have more questions, please feel free to ask.  But let me know which way you're leaning and which other details matter to you, so I can give you a better idea of what you might want to look for.

Thank you for this it really helped I went through and checked all of these laptops and out of all I did like the MSI the best it would make more sense to buy a laptop with 2070 if I'm gonna purchase in that price range. 

My question is what is the difference between the 1 TB HDD and 512 GB SSD or are they all together to make storage 

https://www.newegg.com/black-msi-gl-series-gl75-10sfk-029-gaming-entertainment/p/N82E16834155401

@gabbymck1028  The SSD and HDD are both storage, and internally, they'd just show up as two drives; you could move files to one or the other as you wished.

If you're looking for more general info, there are a few different kinds of hard drives, with different read and write speeds.  The slowest are mechanical drives (HDDs), which run slowly enough that you'd notice longer loading times in most games: it takes a longer time to read from or write to these drives no matter what kind of data is involved.  But HDDs are cheap and reliable, so they're great for bulk storage.  It would be fine to keep, for example, your movies or music on one—the content would play back the same from any drive.

Solid state drives come in two types: SATA (fast) and NVMe (much faster).  Relative to the faster type of HDD, a SATA SSD might be 3-4 times faster, and an NVMe SSD around 20 times faster, although a lot of applications (including most games) won't take full advantage of the NVMe speed and will probably run just as fast on a SATA SSD.  The MSI has an NVMe SSD, which is where Windows will be installed, and you'd also want to install any game that requires a lot of loading on the SSD as well.

512 GB is plenty of storage, so you should be able to fit Sims 4, Apex, and GTA 5 and probably GTA 6 on that drive; you'd only need to start moving files around if you installed other games as well.    You could certainly install Sims 4 on an HDD—loading times are short enough that you might not mind the extra delay.  Or you could move game content you're not currently using, like cc and extra saves, to the HDD and then back to the SSD when you start playing again.

This was good to know information you've been a big help to me in finding a gaming laptop thank you I was completely lost and I've learned more about a laptop then ever before from you and I didn't know there was so much of a difference. 

Also is it better to buy a extended warranty for the laptop on Newegg? 

@gabbymck1028  I don't think the extended warranty is worth the money.  It usually only starts when the manufacturer's warranty runs out, and most issues with gaming laptops happen either right away or after a few years.  So you'd either be contacting the manufacturer, or the extended warranty would have run out too.

If you're in a situation where your laptop has a chance of getting damaged, for example if you travel a lot, the extended warranty may be worth it.  Otherwise, I don't think it is.