@puzzlezaddictI hadn't heard of that company so thats good information, thank you! I found a couple of options on their website (one is out of stock right now but I want to bookmark it for when it comes back if it's a good option)...
For $945 there's one with these specs:
And there's one thats sold out right now for $1129 with these specs:
Also, I had previously found this, but I know you said HP can be more limited:
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-pavilion-gaming-tg01-1185t
Let me know what you think, and also whether if I bought one of these now if I'd be paying significantly more than I would be at another time. I'm somewhat in a rush to find a good option now because I haven't been able to play the game in a while and I'm trying to get back to my Tumblr followers before I'm considered inactive and people start to unfollow 😆
@simsical-musical Both Cyberpower options are good, not perfect but good starts with room for improvement if and when it becomes necessary. For the first one, I'd add another 8 GB RAM right away if you're doing any streaming or heavy multitasking, e.g. editing photos while you play. The 1650 is more than good enough for now, and the power supply and motherboard will support a upgrade if you want one in a couple of years. The processor is overkill, but that's not a bad thing.
For the second one, the graphics card is far and away more power than Sims 4 will ever need, again not a bad thing. The only component I don't like all that much is the processor, but it'll do for now, and if you want something stronger in the future, the board will support a Ryzen 5000-series CPU. As an example, the 5600X is more than powerful enough for any game currently in existence, and I've seen it for as low as $200 on sale, that is when you can find one. But you shouldn't need the upgrade now.
Normally, I'd buy the fastest CPU that came with a decent graphics card and go from there, but given the easy upgrade path, I'd call this a tossup. For reference, if you wanted to buy a new GPU and the market was normal, you could get a 3060 ti for $400 or a bit more, and a 3060 for maybe $350, so between that and the RAM, the total cost over time would be quite similar if you did in fact upgrade. But like I said, you don't strictly need to add anything to either build.
The HP is fine for what it is, and a similar, slightly cheaper model (configurable from a lower baseline) would be a good budget option. But HP puts the weakest power supply it can get away with in its Pavilion desktops, and the PSU and motherboard at least used to use proprietary connectors, making upgrading much more complicated than it should be. It's the kind of headache that's worth saving money for someone with a budget around $800, but probably not for you.
@puzzlezaddictSo which do you think would get me the best possible graphics without getting laggy/slow? Would both support reshade if I was to add that as well?
Also, how does the $900 version compare to my current specs and the computer with the MSI Z270 Gaming Plus motherboard, Intel Core i7 7700k processor and NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1050 Ti I mentioned earlier?
Sorry for asking a lot of detailed questions but I really don’t know much about all of this...
@simsical-musical The 1650 is somewhere around 30% faster in gaming than the 1050 ti, although that depends a lot on the game involved. The 7700K is a few percentage points faster than the 3600, and the 11600KF is significantly faster, but that's not nearly as relevant: for comparison's sake, a 7700K can drive a 2080 ti without issues.
Both graphics cards support Reshade, but if you're planning to overload your game with Reshade filters and custom content, you may want the faster graphics right away. While the 1650 is more than fast enough to maintain 60 fps (and then some) on ultra settings under normal circumstances, its margin isn't so high that it can also absorb a heavy load on top of the game.
If you want to get an idea of what you're looking at, try playing without Reshade and with zero cc, then add both back, and compare framerates. I can't give you an accurate picture because a lot of this depends on what kind of cc you have, and Reshade's impact can vary depending on which features you use. But if the fps hit from adding Reshade and cc is around 10%, the 1650 should still be fine. If it's around 30%... well, the 1650 would still be fine overall, but you'll probably notice some fps drops too.
I also want to be clear that Sims 4 will slow down from time to time on even the most powerful hardware. This can't be helped: it seems to be something about the game engine and what it needs to process. I've seen slowdowns where my CPU and GPU were nowhere near maxed out on any statistic, and I've heard the same from enough other people, and seen the benchmark tests in some cases, to know it's not about my machine.
Having said that, the faster the card, the more of a buffer you have for the fps drops, up to a point. The speed of the processor can also help resolve some types of slowdowns, but it won't eliminate them completely either. So there's an argument to be made for both builds.
In the end, this may all be moot, of course, if the second Cyberpower option doesn't come back into stock. (On that note, you could contact the company and ask; maybe they'll let you know whether they plan to bring it back any time soon.) If the first one is the only option, I think you'd be happy with its performance overall, even if it's not perfect 100% of the time. It should certainly outperform the 7700K/1050 ti by an obvious margin, so if that's your standard, you should be fine.
@puzzlezaddictOkay, thank you so so much for your help, I think I’ll probably go with the $900 option! One last ask though... any recommendations for a monitor off Amazon? One of the complaints I have about my current laptop is that the screen quality is such a drop from Apple screens and it made anything look a bit fuzzy, not just the game. So I'm just looking for a decent sized monitor that probably has 144 fps and good brightness (that's a problem too on my current one) and easy for a beginner to set up and use...
