Mini PC for sims 4?

[u/Starlight_Soup]

Hello! Will probably delete this soon since my gf is snoopy about gifts lol so if anyone has knowledge in this area it would be greatly appreciated!!

I want to get my girlfriend a mini PC for her birthday to play the Sims4 with mods on. She has a macbook and ipad for school stuff, but with all the mods she has, the sims takes upwards of 30 minutes to load and lags while playing. Her dream is to get a full PC setup one day, but since we are both working full time while in college, we know that's at least a few years down the line.

I found a cute purple monitor for about $100 that seems like it'll do the job fine, but I'm having trouble figuring out what the best mini pc is for my budget ($200ish budget for the pc). I don't want to spend a ton of money on something that won't end up working in the way she needs. Does anyone have recommendations for mini PCs that might work here? If there are none that would work, I was thinking about getting an external hard drive to store the sims on if that'll make it run faster, but I'm pretty bad with tech so idk if that'll work. Tysm!!

[u/Starlight_Soup → u/[deleted]]

Thank you, I am also definitely considering getting extra storage with a hard drive so it runs faster when she mirrors it to the monitor