Laptop recommendations?

"puzzlezaddict;c-17409149" wrote:
Before saying anything else, all of the laptops I'm listing would handle everything Sims 3 could throw at them on ultra settings. I'm basing all this on Planet Zoo because it's significantly more demanding, and your budget has plenty of room to accommodate its requirements.

As it turns out, you could get a laptop with hardware that's at or above all the recommendations for Planet Zoo for $1,100, plus free shipping. (In this case the recommended hardware should be able to run Planet Zoo on high settings at a 1920x1080 resolution smoothly at 60 fps.) Cyberpower is having a sale right now, and this model is surprisingly cheap:

https://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Tracer-III-15Z-Slim-VR-300

Its Nvidia 2060 is a little better than the recommended 1070, which itself is a bit higher than seems necessary—an AMD RX 580 is the other recommendation, and it's a significantly slower card than the 1070. The processor is above the rec by a good margin, and 16 GB RAM is plenty; it sounds from the reviews like 8 GB is only barely not enough.

This laptop comes with a 512 GB SSD standard, which is enough storage for all three games plus your saves, mods, cc, and whatever smaller apps you'd want to install. You could also upgrade to a 1 GB SSD if you wanted: among the options, the WD Blue is the same price as the default 512 GB Intel. WD's solid state drives are fine, not the best and not problematic either, but I doubt it would make a difference as long as your plans don't include lots of reinstalls and/or constantly moving around hundreds of GB of data.

Since you wanted several options though, here are a couple more. This MSI is also $1,100 but comes with an additional $100 rebate. It has the same hardware as the Cyberpower except for a slower graphics card—its Nvidia 1660 ti is about equal to the 1070, depending on the benchmark and which site ran it.

https://www.newegg.com/aluminum-black-msi-ge-series-ge65-raider-432-gaming-entertainment/p/N82E16834155331?Item=N82E16834155331

This Dell has the same hardware as the MSI except for the screen, which in all likelihood has a 60 Hz refresh rate. Dell gaming laptops tend to have dimmer screens, still pretty to look at but not as bright, and also correspondingly longer battery life. Of course you'd never want to game on battery, but you might find the longer charge convenient for other purposes.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-g3-15-6-gaming-laptop-intel-core-i7-16gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1660ti-512gb-ssd/6350873.p?skuId=6350873

I saw a lot of other options, but these were the best three for $1,000 and up. Among the cheaper ones, all had at least one less than ideal component: a processor that's under the recommended strength (but still better than the minimum), 8 GB RAM, a single 256 GB SSD. Memory can be added and hard drives swapped, and if you'd like to go that route, this is the best good candidate, at $800 once you subtract the rebate:

https://www.newegg.com/black-msi-gl-series-gl73-9sd-409-gaming-entertainment/p/N82E16834155241?Item=N82E16834155241

If you have any other questions, or you're looking for something a bit different, please feel free to ask.