PC Gaming Beginner.

[LadyAnnaLee]

Hello!

I realize that this may not be the best place to ask this question and/or series of questions, but tumblr, Reddit, and Quora all scare me and I'm not sure where else to go. I thank you all for your help.

I have never played PC games before. I've only ever really played Nintendo games before. As such all the talk about RAM and processor chips and SSD is more than a little over whelming. I do know that my current laptop, which I only use for writting, is not up to the task I have in mind. I just want to play Baldur's Gate Three (For sure!) and Sims 4 (Heavy maybe). I might look into emulators for some Pokémon fan games. I tried going to the Steam page for BG3 and then to the Best Buy site to just filter laptops based on what the page said the game needed, but almost none of it matched up.

So, my question is this. Can anybody tell me what I should be filtering for on computer sites so I can look at all the laptops that will play BG3, so I can find one that won't break the bank. Please and Thank You!

Or, on the other hand, I thought about just getting a Steam Deck. Does anyone know if that's a good choice.

Once again. Thank You So Much!!

LadyAnnaLee

[Kuro]

PCGameBenchmark can help you compare specs to game reqs.

walmart.com/ip/1312771589 is what I have and it runs current year games (Helldivers 2, for instance) just fine. I don't have BG3 but I'd believe it'd run great on it.

[Foster]

Well, you want to find out what sort of PCI slot your main board has, and what wattage your power-supply/board permits.
-There's a slight chance you're running a 20 year old chassis that simply cannot run the latest hardware anymore (the silver-lining is there's shiny surplus stuff that'll probably still manage PS4 level graphics)

90% of the time, when it comes to graphics cards "if the chip fits, it ships" and there's probably software (drivers) to let it function properly out there someplace.... those linux folk are scary, though... And you're kinda screwed if it's an Apple or Mac.

And lastly, desktop-tower PC master-race. When your rig is capable of being so large the air-ducts inside the case are big enough to lose a PS3 inside of... yeah... it has the case-capacity for utterly hilarious upgrades.
-Kinda like comparing a light pickup-truck to a racing ATV.



A bit of a tip is to have a hard-drive that'll function as a library of CDs instead of using CDs, as the read/write-speed is generally greater. Assuming of course doing so does not violate any EULAs (most of the time it won't unless you start renting out your hard-drive full of programs).

My approach was to buy a desktop from a pawn-shop for $200 and then clean and upgrade the hell out of it. Assuming you don't mind the system becoming slightly obsolete, it'll continue chugging for about 20 to 30 years with one or two comprehensive upgrade packages (current-gen graphics card to replace anything woefully obsolete, maxing out the RAM, using aging hard-drives as virtual-RAM etc) in its life.

And yes, I am that kind of guy to run a PC a five year old hard drive for storage, a ten year old one that came standard, and two twenties year old clunkers pulled from the junkyard running parallel as some emulation of a poor-sod's SSD.

Oh, and the version of DirectX hardware acceleration your graphics card supports is probably going to be the first thing to brick your PC out of the latest games than actual performance.

[BrokenPromise]

Try this

Gaming laptops are always expensive and never perform as well as their desktop counterparts. Expect to pay extra for the novelty of carrying around your computer. Also keep an eye out for other features you may want, like blue tooth comparability and built in wireless. Most stuff like that can be added on by buying a dongle, but it can be kind of a hassle if you use certain features daily.

[LadyAnnaLee]

Thank you all for your help!

[Dion]

@LadyAnnaLee BG3 as a game is not necessarily an intensive game and the requirements reflect this. These are the specs:

Minimum	Recommended
CPU: Intel Core i5 4690 / AMD FX 8350 RAM: 8 GB VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GTX 970 / RX 480 (4GB+ of VRAM) DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 4096 MB PIXEL SHADER: 5.1 VERTEX SHADER: 5.1 OS: Windows 10 64-bit FREE DISK SPACE: 150 GB	CPU: Intel Core i7 8700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600 RAM: 16 GB VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super / RX 5700 XT (8GB+ of VRAM) DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 8192 MB PIXEL SHADER: 5.1 VERTEX SHADER: 5.1 OS: Windows 10 64-bit FREE DISK SPACE: 150 GB

You can ignore pixel shader, vertex shader, OS and free disk space since those are not usually influencable through the purchase. What matters most is the CPU, ram and video card. Since you are shopping for a laptop it is also important to remember that laptops typically under-perform by a significant margin due to heat throttling and other issues that result from the compact nature of a laptop. That said the recommended specs for BG3 are so low that most last- or current-gen laptops will be able to keep up. Any of the laptops listed in @BrokenPromise's link are good and some are 'technically' overkill on the recc. specs (but recc. specs are usually not guaranteed to actually work, I think they are baselined on medium graphical settings, lol).

If you are only interested in BG3, aiming for between the minimum and recommended specs or a little above would probably be good enough. If you want to play other things or think you might be interested in other things later, it might be a good idea to overshoot a bit more (16gb of RAM is more than enough still nowadays, but having 32gb of RAM has gone from a luxury to a futureproof investment, for example). But it sounds like you're not really interested in that and that makes anything over the recommended specs almost automatically an investment that's not worth it at all.

You ask what to filter for, that's mostly going to be graphics cards, RAM and CPU. I do think buying a laptop specifically for BG3 is a bit of a waste of money, though, unless you also do graphical editing or video editing. Having a powerful CPU is also eventually going to give negligible returns. I think having extra RAM's nice in general, but going for a full 64gb is also useless for most common use scenario's and 32gb is also up there in terms of uselessness, but that is slowly but surely going to erode. GPU's are pricy and laptops specifically get overcharged like crazy for a product that is less powerful.

I think it might be easier to just post a laptop you saw that works for you, and then check if it meets the specs, since there are hundreds of configurations for laptops and they all have different benefits and costs.

[Foster]

otoh, you probably don't want to go to this level of budget:


That said, such a rig would still beat the stuffing out of an N64 and can also do non-gamer stuff.

[Lith]

All above are good bits of advice.

That said, I own a Steam Deck (Oled model), and it's surprisingly competent with BG3. Only place it stuttered was Act 3 and one of the patches addressed that. It also runs emulators very nicely, and despite it having Linux as its operating system which you may or may not be familiar with, there's a lot of easy tools out there to hit the ground running quick.

https://retrodeck.net/ I'm partial to this myself.

I can vouch for it being pretty comfy to do what you're wanting to do --- but there are for sure cheaper options if price point is the big sticking factor. Especially since you'll want/need some accessories to get a "full computer" experience you may be accustomed to. And again, if you're unfamiliar with Linux, there is a learning curve.

Hope you find what you're looking for.

[LadyAnnaLee]

@Lith
@Foster
@Dion
@BrokenPromise
@Kuro

Thank you all so much! Eventually I did decide on a laptop rather than a Steam Deck and thanks to all of the amazing information I got from all you wonderful people I managed to find one that works! I am super excited to join the ranks of BG3 players. Hopefully I don't die right away. Once again. All of my gratitude to you wonderful people.

[Foster]

@Lith
@Foster
@Dion
@BrokenPromise
@Kuro

Thank you all so much! Eventually I did decide on a laptop rather than a Steam Deck and thanks to all of the amazing information I got from all you wonderful people I managed to find one that works! I am super excited to join the ranks of BG3 players. Hopefully I don't die right away. Once again. All of my gratitude to you wonderful people.

@LadyAnnaLee

You'll probably die right away, but that's half the fun.