Is it necessary to get a gaming laptop to play sims 3?

I'm in the process of deciding on which kind of laptop I want. The main purpose of it would be for school but in my spare I enjoy watching things online and I play Sims 3. I have narrowed down that if I get a gaming/multimedia laptop it'll be a Lenovo Y-series because of the good price and quality($719 w/e-coupon).

My old laptop is Toshiba Satellite. It did ok handling Sims 3 but I was only able to play 1 expansion pack at a time, I couldn't have more than 2 worlds at a time installed, and I was limited to how many downloadable items I could install without having it lag more. Eventually the laptop burned out.

My cousin has a Lenovo ThinkPad and he has thousands of songs on his and 2 games: Sims 3 along with 1 expansion pack and one of those Japanese H-games. Everything seems to run a lot smoother on his laptop than it did on mine.

So is the gaming laptop nesscesary? Should I breakdown and get the Lenovo? Is there a better less pricey opinion?

Guest

Find out the requirements of Sims 3, then make sure your current laptop or any laptop you're thinking of buying meets or better yet, exceeds those requirements for Sims 3.

Smokies Hiker

It is not necessary, i have a regular laptop and sims 3 with 5 expansions works perfectly fine.

Alex

I have been playing Sims since it was created, and I also build computers, something I learned to do specifically because Sims games never seemed to be able to run smoothly in spite of the specs on pre-fabricated "gaming" machines or gaming laptops. The truth is that even the best gaming laptop available will not be able to handle Sims 3 with all it's added stuff packs and expansion packs, there's simply no room in a laptop for the size of the graphics card required to smoothly run and cool it. You will also pay significantly more for a laptop when you add "gaming" to it, when the only difference is that instead of the graphic chip being incorporated through the mobo and cpu, it stands on it's own, which provides better graphic performance for sure but is not even remotely large enough to handle that game with all it's components. If you are only playing the base game then you can reference the spec requirements safely, otherwise if you are playing more components, then the spec requirements listed for the game do not apply, as they are specific to just the base game alone.

Guest

Look for one with high gpu and a high ram, i would recommend a 2.6 or above for gpu, and more than 3gb ram. This will run ok, that is recommended.

William