Forum Discussion

Simmerville's avatar
Simmerville
Seasoned Ace
13 days ago

New PC - is a Gaming PC needed these days?

I'm looking for a new stationary PC as my current is pushing 9 years - Win 8.1 with plenty of disc space but no dedicated video RAM and probably a stone-age integrated video card. My huge 2014 save still works fine when I stay on just one lot, but loading, saving and traveling etc  gets very annoying as it means wasting lots of simming time. Aaand, the game occasionally lags when there are background operations like launching/announcing a new holiday or NPCs entering the hood etc. No surprise on such an old  machine. I just replaced my old laptop (which is not for gaming) and find it practical to upgrade the stationary now, to get the same Windows version on both.

So, I'm wondering what is the most important to look for in a new PC? The Sims is the only bigger game played, other tasks are minor home office work including simple photo editing and some video editing/OBS captures etc, which also begs me to say goodbye to Win 8.1 but probably will not demand much extra beyond a new standard pc.

I'm now wondering if I really need a "gaming pc" for The Sims, such machines aims for games I think are much more tech demanding. Will this game still run smoothly with all packs and some cc, on a regular new office computer? I've been simming since T1 and spend hours on the game, so I think it might be time to level up a bit to enjoy the game on max settings.

What are the particular factors I should pay notice to? i3, i5, i7 etc is all confusing, I understand the highest numbers are the best technically, but this game might not benefit from the top notch tech anyway? What video card is recommended (not thinking of what cards will work, but what will give me a top The Sims experience without going much beyond what is needed? I'm currently on a Lenovo feat. integrated AMD, and somehow I think AMD suits TS4 well, but I have no idea why I think so, and these things might have changed. Maybe getting a dedicated vid RAM will probably make for a huge improvement? There's always a budget, and the PC will mostly be used for text/spreadsheets and ordinary web stuff, which makes a gaming rig feel a bit over the top.

I found a few options that I can afford:

Alt 1. Aorus Z260CR Gaming pc, some specs are: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, 16GB DDR4 RAM. (Somehow I feel this is a bit over the top for TS4, or?)

Alt 2. Ordinary pc; Acer Aspire XC-840 stationary PC, 4 x Intel® Pentium® Silver N6005-processor, 8 GB 2-chanels DDR4 RAM, 256 GB SSD-storing.

Alt 3. Compact LOQ Tower gaming PC, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB, Intel® Core™ i5-13400F, 512 GB M.2 NVMe SSD, Intel® B760-brikkesett.

Not in a super hurry, but maybe this Black Friday would be a good time for shopping. Knowing what I should most definitely be looking for or avoid would help a lot. Thanks for all input.

hardware
  • Fengjui's avatar
    Fengjui
    New Vanguard
    12 days ago

    I would get a computer that is right for you and I don't know if you really need a gaming PC. My dad (who is 83 years old) has HP laptop that has a AMD processor and he doesn't like it; when he plays his games.  I have HP Pavilion with a Intel Processor and I also play games on it.  My suggestion is to get a computer that you are familiar with. Like for my dad and I, we always had a HP computer. 

    Here is the link to HP website:  https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop?jumpid=re_r11662_redirect_ETR

    Check it out and they are also doing a Black Friday sales. 

     

  • jpkarlsen's avatar
    jpkarlsen
    Retired Hero
    12 days ago

    Number 1 and 3 are more or less identical except for amount of RAM and disk space. Go for at least 500GB SSD. The more the better. The graphic card will help with the video editing.
    Number 2 is too weak.
    With Black Friday just around the corner you may wish to wait and see what offers comes up. Feel free to post links to any you like so we can take a look.

    • Simmerville's avatar
      Simmerville
      Seasoned Ace
      12 days ago

      Thanks!

      Just found that my old PC had a pretty well sized hard drive of 905 GB... I never upgraded, so I'm pretty surprised that it was this big on a cheap low-end computer, and this is probably why it lasted for all these years (and still does if I accept long loading times for ts4). I think I will need to go way beyond 500GB on my next, but don't find anything near that size on the affordable offers. Assuming that just the OS itself will take up way more space than my old Win 8.1. These days storing in the cloud might be more common, though.

      • jpkarlsen's avatar
        jpkarlsen
        Retired Hero
        12 days ago

        Windows 11 doesn't take much more space than Windows 8.1.

        As long as it is a desktop it will be easy to add a secondary drive or upgrade the existing.

  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    Hero+
    11 days ago

    Simmerville  If you plan on recording your gameplay, you may want a faster graphics card than the RTX 3050.  That GPU would handle the load, but perhaps not as smoothly as you'd want.  And in the U.S. at least, systems with the much faster RTX 4060 are not that much more expensive most of the time.

    They also often come with a 1 TB SSD, not that that helps with Sims 4 directly, but you might find a use for the extra storage if you're recording and editing videos.

    If you'd like other suggestions, feel free to ask, and post your budget and country as well as any other details that matter to you.

About The Sims 4 Technical Issues - PC

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