Re: Affordable PC Options for optical gaming of Sims 4
@whynotsim All of the options you've listed would be more than fine for all the games you've listed. I don't know what the requirements for ultra settings will be for Life By You or Paralives, but for Sims 4, a desktop 3050 is well above what you'd need. You could get away with a 1650 as well and still have room to spare, in case you're looking at used computers, but for new models at least, you wouldn't be saving much money, and the upgrade to even a 3050 or 1660 ti is significant.
The 6500XT is behind those two in performance, and although it's above a 1650 in overall speed, I'd avoid it unless you're looking at a much better price. Between the somewhat small improvement over the 1650 and the occasional issues with AMD cards or drivers in Sims 4 and other games, it's not the best choice for someone who wants to play Sims 4 and not spend time troubleshooting, again if the prices are similar. (To be clear, I don't mean crashing/can't play, I mean minor slowdowns or inconveniences that mess up your screenshots.) For $100 less, I'd strongly consider it and just accept that reflections in mirrors might be backwards for a few months or whatever.
For the processor, I'd try to avoid the Ryzen 3rd-gen processors like the R5 3600 in the third option, again if all else were equal. I've tried to troubleshoot a few instances of the game running slowly and not utliziing much graphics power on systems with this and similar CPUs that I couldn't explain or solve. So I try to avoid recommending those when I can find other options at a similar price. But again, it's not like the game wouldn't work at all, it just might not run as well as it should given the hardware. The newer AMD processors don't have this issue as far as I've seen.
Life By You does specify that it requires 16 GB RAM. But memory is extremely easy to upgrade and quite cheap these days, at least for the DDR4 kits you'd be considering. So while it would be nice to find a system with 16 GB already installed, you could also wait a while, then buy yourself more for $40 or so and install it in a couple of minutes.
So among the three, the first choice would be my recommendation and the one I'd buy for myself, at least at the sale price. I don't think it's at all worth an extra $250 over the third one, and I'm not sure the third is better than the second at that price difference either. But if you're looking at used systems too, you might find the configuration you're looking for at a price that makes it worthwhile.
I also want to say that if you really would like to keep the budget down, this one would be absolutely fine. Its CPU does only have four cores, but that's plenty for the games you want to play (and in fact this is a very good processor for mid-tier games), plus you could upgrade it in the future if you needed to. A used i5-13600K might be under $200 by the time you're looking.
On the flip side, if you want to go big, this is an excellent option, total overkill but also not more expensive than the current prices of the ones you're considering. And Skytech's build quality is usually very good:
https://www.newegg.com/skytech-st-azure-0641-b-ne/p/3D5-000Z-000Z2
If you find something else you like, feel free to link it here. I'm around every day, so you shouldn't need to wait long for a reply.
