New PC - is a Gaming PC needed these days?

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not sure how smart it is to post in this old thread, but hey-ho...

I found an interesting system that might meet rec specs both for ts4 and video editing. 

HP Victus 15L gaming-PC i5-13/16GB RAM/512 GB SSD/4060
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB
Intel Core i5

Anything about this one that would not be a good choice for TS4 or video editing?
Not sure why the store brands it "gaming-PC", except coming with dedicated video RAM I don't get the wow feeling.

The specs given with the Life & Death EP recommends (minimum)
"VIDEO CARD:
1 GB of Video RAM, NVIDIA GTX 650, AMD Radeon HD 7750, or better"

How can I compare this to the recommendation? I assume the larger number "4060" should be way newer than "650", but how would I know if it is barely better or way better? I want a card that will also be supporting TS4 in a couple years, not something that is slightly above recommendations today.

Anyone still there? ;)
jpkarlsen

Simmerville  The minimum and recommended requirements for each pack are woefully out of date, even with the recent update.  Not to mention, they're for the base game and that one pack, not all content together.  A GTX 650 is slower than most decent iGPUs now and shouldn't even be mentioned in the same category as an RTX 4060.  In general though, the first and possibly second digits are the generation (6 through 9, 10 and 16, 20-40), and second-to-last digit is the rank within that generation.  So a 4060 is the newer 3060; a 4050 is a cut-down 4060, metaphorically most of the time but literally in this case as they're built from the same overall chip.

If you want to compare GPUs, you can simply google "X vs. Y" and get a general idea.  I wouldn't suggest doing this for cards that are close in performance, as the numbers may not be accurate and would also only give you an overall picture, cutting out some important nuances.  But for very large differences, it doesn't really matter if the numbers are 20% off—you're still seeing that one is much faster than the other.

An RTX 4060 is significant overkill for Sims 4 and always will be unless the game changes dramatically in a way that it never has.  Since the goal of the developers seems to be to keep the game accessible to as many players as possible, I would guess that it's not going to ever be demanding enough to tax a 4060.  The point about wanting a faster GPU is for the video recording/editing side, where more speed can and does make a difference, depending on what software you use and how patient you are.

Stores brand anything with a gaming graphics card as a gaming PC or laptop, and sometimes include computers that have no business receiving the "gaming" tag.  It doesn't have to be a high-end, can run everything out there on ultra settings, type of machine to be considered gaming-oriented.

Anyway, if you don't need your video editing to be extremely efficient, this system may be absolutely fine for your purposes.  An i7 or Ryzen 7 would be faster, sure, but it might not have any practical effect for you.  I can't give you a better answer because I don't know what software you'll use or whether you're going to be staring at the screen waiting for something to complete while getting increasingly impatient.  I will say that for most users, this laptop would be sufficient.

Separately, it's fine to post in a thread of this age, and in fact better in general so we can all see the context of your newest question.  If the delay were more like a year, it would be best to create a new thread, linking back to the old one.