Hardware Requirments: Graphics

rizzodun

My daughter has dropped the bomb of wanting a laptop for Christmas, she mainly wants it for minecraft, and to help with school work etc.

Minecraft is just leaving me with one question, recommended hardware requirements seem to be the following (from the minecraft wiki)

CPU : Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 (K8) 2.6 GHz
RAM : 2GB
GPU : GeForce 6xxx or ATI Radeon 9xxx and up with OpenGL 2.0 support (excluding integrated chipsets)
HDD : 150MB

I know that recommended req's allow the game to run full steam so could peg the performance somewhat is needed

So, in short, can I get an off the shelf laptop with an intergrated graphics chipset rather than a dedicated GPU, and how will this skew the specs to allow the game to run smoothy (more RAM higher CPU etc)?

Any guide to expected price would be a help also.

Come back Unreal Tournament and CFS all is forgiven!

cherryghost

Any laptop with an Intel HD 3000 will play it just fine. Just be weary though, in brick and mortar shops some models are first gen i series laptops. The original Intel HD does not run the game so smoothly.

As for AMD graphics, most modern AMD laptops have integrated AMD graphic chipsets which are also fine for Minecraft.

rizzodun

Cheers cherryghost, narrows the field for me somewhat.

cherryghost

No problem, what's your budget if you don't mind me asking?

rizzodun

I don't want to spend more than €400, absolutely top limit, considerably less if I can find the right deal, it'll be an investment providing it helps her with her schoolwork and hopefully I can use it to teach her a thing or two outside of the normal windows user, but at the same time she's only 11 coming on 12 and I'm not comfortable spending that large on one item for her, the pc I have is more than adequate for what the household uses but too underpowered for gaming, and running Lubuntu linux. Minecraft will probably be the only game to run on it by the way. Not planning on running steam or mainstream pc titles. So the barest minimum for mincraft will be adequate. Thanks for the advice too!

cherryghost

No bother at all man! Well you could try adverts.ie, you could pick up some sweet 2nd hand laptops there for under 300 euro and would do the job. I've been looking online for laptops and there's quite a few under 400 that would do the job for you too.

Komplett have a decent laptop at 379 (free postage) that seems good value. Here's a video of an identically specc'd machine running Minecraft:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1ynXLl_t3I

Saveonlaptops have a decent one too at 350 (excluding postage), but runs a bit faster than the first laptop. Can't find any videos of Minecraft but the fact it runs Crysis smoothly showcases that it can play Minecraft.

Otherwise computerunivserse.net have even cheaper laptops, the only drawback being is sometimes you don't have the option for a UK keyboard layout, only German.

rizzodun

Excellent info again cherryghost, luckily the only connection she's had with minecraft is on the xbox360, so seeing as that is quite limited she'll be a tad easier pleased than a seasoned pc gamer, which helps, I'm gonna check those sites, now I know the sort specs I'm aiming for!