help figuring out super entry level (?) gaming pc for beamng drive

August 23, 2023 9:48 AM

My kid is DYING to play BeamNG.drive on Steam and I want to make this his birthday gift. I foolishly bought it and tried to load it on my ancient laptop and figured out....no. Not even close. Ebay has a ton of refurbished gaming PCs but I can't grok which ones will play this game smoothly. Can you recommend a rig (and even better if there's a reliable seller)?
posted by AgentRocket to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Best answer: Have you considered a Steam Deck?

This is a "hand held" unit made by Valve (the people who make Steam) that can also be docked to a TV to play on the big screen, etc.

It's a great way to access and play games from your Steam library at home or on the go in an affordable way. The base Steam Deck is only $399 - so, right in line with a lot of those used gaming machines.

And, since it's new, none of the sketch that can potentially come with buying used tech over the internet.

I checked, and BeamNG.drive works great on it.

I got one for my wife for her birthday last year and she loves it.
posted by kbanas at 10:02 AM on August 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Seconding the Steam Deck. My 12 year old nephew has threatened to steal mine, since he prefers handhelds over anything else. It's also easy to hook up to the TV. I have the $399 model and it works pretty well.

A warning if you go this route - you might be in for more than $399 to get it up and running. If you want easy charging/hookup to a TV, you might want the dock which is $90. The base model doesn't have a ton of storage, so you'll want an SD card. It also looks like BeamNG.drive is listed as "playable" on Steamdeck, and I see it only has "partial controller support" so you might need a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to make everything work smoothly.
posted by little king trashmouth at 11:02 AM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

One low commitment option is to "rent" a rig on demand by playing it via a cloud service like GeForceNow. Performance will vary based on your internet connection and exactly how ancient your laptop is, but there's a free tier and a $10 a month tier you could try out. I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 this way and it feels as though I'm playing locally.

Basically you install a generic GFN client, and it connects to your steam library and lets you play "most" steam games, including BeamNG. Some games run great this way, some have weird glitches but it's not hard to try and see how it goes.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 11:15 AM on August 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

A couple years ago I was able to play this game on a pretty crap non-gaming laptop that was from probably 2015-2016. The same computer was totally incapable of running Skyrim, for comparison. Not ideal, there was some lag, but on a semi new gaming laptop you should be fine.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:39 AM on August 23, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks for the recommendations. I knew about the Steam Deck but hadn't considered that it could be a good option for us. I just ordered one and with a dock it will make a great system in general for family fun. (And nothing like fixing your foolish $25 purchase by doubling down with a $500 one...)
posted by AgentRocket at 11:50 AM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

For about $500 you can make a decent system using an AMD cpu with built in graphics. Here is one example from PCPartPicker. Bonus is that you'll also be building a memory, and possibly adding to his expletive vocabulary.
posted by Sophont at 7:03 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]