Can this laptop handle Sims 4 with expansions?

@missdancer145  I personally would pay the extra to play my favorite game on ultra settings, at least up to a point.  (I wouldn't be here telling you to spend £2,000 if that's what was required; that would just be unreasonable.)  I tend to think about these things in terms of how much time I'll spend with the game, or using the computer overall, and for that, another £100-200 for a game I might play for literally a thousand hours on this laptop seems well worth the price.

Sims 4 will lag at times; that's just what it does and is an inevitable result of the way it's built.  The question is not how to avoid lag but how to ensure it resolves as quickly as is possible given the constraints of the game engine.  For that, the processor matters a lot, and you're looking at models that are all, for practical purposes, reasonably close to the best options out there.  This can get a little complicated, but the goal is to give Sims 4 four processor cores all to itself, with those cores running at a high clock speed.

For that, a gaming laptop is usually somewhat better than a non-gaming laptop, although some CPUs in non-gaming laptops are also very capable.  (It depends on the model, and there are too many to summarize neatly.)  But this isn't the difference between lag and no lag, or a lot and a little; it's more about resolving the incidents quickly.

The larger difference is in graphics quality, where the gaming laptops you're considering are more than twice as fast as any laptop without a dedicated graphics card.  Here again, I think it's totally reasonable to spend more money to be able to play comfortably on ultra graphics settings—you're going to be staring at the game a lot, and it's more fun if it looks pretty.

At the end of the day though, it's not my money.  And I'm also a person who learned to build a gaming PC in order to install the parts I wanted and play higher-end games, so I might not be the most objective source.