Can anybody provide help finding a laptop/pc to run the sims 4 & a few add on's, I'm in the UK and don't have a great budget between £200-£500.
I was also looking into this but would rather try buy outright before getting monthly installments - https://www.currys.co.uk/products/acer-aspire-c241800-23.8-allinone-pc-intel-core-i5-512-gb-ssd-black-10251973.html
Thanks
@SlimmBailey Your budget is actually fine for a laptop, not a gaming machine but something that should run Sims 4 on medium-high to high settings. All-in-one PCs are more expensive for the same hardware, so you're paying more for a bigger screen and less portability without getting any benefit.
If you'd like to play on a larger screen, I'd suggest buying a used monitor on Ebay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, or whatever you're comfortable with. In person, you could inspect the monitor and test it a bit, especially if you bring your new laptop with you; Ebay has decent consumer protections in your region at least. Used monitors can be very cheap, and as long as the ports on the laptop and monitor match, they're compatible with each other.
For the laptop itself, since you can go to £500, I would recommend getting a system with 16 GB RAM. While it's not strictly necessary, it does make multitasking easier, and you may find that in a couple of years, 8 GB isn't enough to play Sims 4 while doing anything else. That's just speculation, but apps and OSs are using more memory all the time.
Anyway, this is the cheapest 16 GB laptop I found that also has a good processor and graphics chip. It should handle all current Sims 4 content on medium-high to high settings:
These one is a little faster, maybe 5-10% in gaming, enough to be worth the small price increase if you're comfortable paying the extra:
This one is also £500 and has the same hardware as the first, but it's from Currys as opposed to Dell, if that makes a difference:
https://www.currys.co.uk/products/acer-swift-3-14-laptop-amd-ryzen-5-512-gb-ssd-silver-10254285.html
All three have HDMI ports, so any monitor that supported HDMI would be compatible. The Dell laptops have older HDMI that only supports 1080p at 60 Hz, so it wouldn't be worth getting a high-resolution or high-refresh-rate monitor if you went with one of these.
Usually there are a few more options with 16 GB memory in the £450-500 range, and it's possible this is just not a good time to buy that particular kind of laptop. If you don't like these three options for whatever reason, it might be better to come back later. Or, if you're comfortable installing more RAM yourself (or have a friend who could do it for you), I could find a good laptop with 8 GB RAM and you could buy more memory, which would cost around £20-40 depending on the configuration.
Let me know what you think, and if you have more questions, please feel free to ask.
