@ItsJordyKings Sims 4 will lag on even the most powerful systems. That's just how it's built. So the question becomes not how can players avoid lag so much as what they can do to minimize the impact of that lag, how it can be resolved as quickly as possible.
When most people use the word "lag," they're describing a delay between telling the game to do something at that thing happening, or a pause where nothing happens before the game catches up. One good example is that with Eco Lifestyle installed and sims allowed to vote on Neighborhood Action Plans, the game will almost inevitably lag a bit as the voting period closes and the new NAP-related data is applied to sims in the neighborhood.
This lag can resolve quickly or slowly, and for this type at least, the most important detail is the speed of the processor. It's not about i5 vs. i7 so much as how high the CPU can clock and how much it can accomplish per cycle. Sims 4 can only use four CPU cores, so you'd get no benefit from having more than six (two for background tasks), and two processors made by the same company and of the same generation will likely be completing the same workload per core per clock cycle.
Therefore, if the i5's boost clock speed is as high as the i7, or very close, and the i7's only advantage is that it has 8 cores instead of 6, it's not worth the upgrade. If the i7 clocks more like 500 MHz higher, you'd probably see a small benefit, but one measured in seconds, if that, at least when you're comparing two CPUs built for gaming. Whether that improvement is worth the money is a personal decision.
For the graphics card, a 4050 is somewhat faster than a 3050, and a 2050 is, frankly, a bad product that should be avoided. The 3050 can run Sims 4 on ultra settings, but the 4050 would give you more room to account for high poly custom content or Reshade or whatever else you want to add to your game. I personally think upgrading to a 4050 is worth some amount of money, and I would do it (up to a point) if my budget allowed it, but we're not talking about my money here.
If you'd like me to take a look at the various laptops you're considering, freel free to link them.
