Best Desktop PC to purchase for Sims 4?
Hello!
My wife's birthday is coming up and she plays The Sims 4 religiously on her laptop right now (all expansions, CC, mods, etc,) with limited performance. I want to buy her a desktop PC to play the game on (and for other light work,) but am having trouble finding the right cost/spec balance.
I found some old threads, but most of those desktops appear to be not available anymore, so I figured I would ask for suggestions. This isn't really my scene, so I apologize if I made a mistake in posting this question. Thank you to anyone for any help!
@ShanePHallam I checked Cyberpower's site and had a hard time bringing a custom build under $1,000. It's doable if you catch the right sale, e.g. the day when an upgrade to 16 GB RAM is free, but still more expensive than the cheapest prebuilt options with the same hardware. Let me know if you want to play with different configurations, or you can take a look at this one, although its CPU and GPU are overpowered for Sims 4.
https://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Work-From-Home-Special-II
For prebuilds, you have a number of good options in your price range. This is the cheapest one ($750) I saw that would work well, although it's overkill for Sims 4. It should run all current and future packs together on ultra graphics settings with some room to spare. It does only have a 500 GB hard drive, but it's a solid state drive, so it's fast, and you could add more storage later if you wanted. 500 GB is enough for several large games, the associated user data (including a giant pile of custom content), and most people's work needs too.
This one is $800 and has an Intel processor instead of AMD, if that matters to you. The i5-9400F is a few percentage points faster in gaming than the Ryzen 2600, although that wouldn't make a difference to Sims 4.
https://www.newegg.com/asus-rog-strix-gl10cs-nh561/p/N82E16883221575?Item=N82E16883221575
This one is $880 and has a Ryzen 3600, which in gaming benchmarks ranges from essentially equal to about 20% faster than a 9400F, depending on the game and who's running the benchmark. It's much faster in heavy non-gaming tasks though, so if your wife's work involves graphic design or similar, the 3600 would be a better option. This model also has 16 GB RAM, a slightly faster graphics card than the ones above, and more storage than you'd ever need.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1558988-REG/cyberpowerpc_gma9020cpg_gamer_master_ryzen_5.html
On the high end, this one is $1,000 and has an Intel 9700F processor, which is significantly stronger than the 3600 for gaming, although the 3600 still might win for non-gaming tasks. (Apparently there aren't as many benchmarks out there for the 9700F as for other CPUs.) This also has 16 GB memory, the same slightly faster GPU as the one above, and a combination 500 GB SSD/1 TB HDD, which is still probably more storage than you'd ever need.
The other option is to configure this Dell with the hardware you want. It's more expensive for the same hardware, but some people like the premium support. If you do configure it, skip the extra RAM (for a very unreasonable $100) and order your own.
If you have more questions, please feel free to ask.
