Cheap laptop with onboard graphics that can play Minecraft

Bacchus1976

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Dec 9, 2014
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I've been commissioned by a non-techie cousin to help recommend a cheap laptop that's primarily intended for a young kid (7-8 years) to play Minecraft on. They are targeting <$300 for the machine and after steering them away from a dev unlocked Chromebook I figured the new HP Stream 13 was the perfect choice.

But, I'm not much of a PC gamer and after doing a little googling I learned that Minecraft is a suprisingly heavy game. So much so that most people seem to recommend a dedicated graphics card, or at least they used to. Not finding much current info out there.

So this question is twofold. What's the least powerful onboard graphics card one would suggest to be able to play Minecraft on "medium" settings on? Can someone recommend a cheap laptop that has the right mix of equipment to handle this?

I'm still thinking the Stream 13 might be the right choice, I found a couple YouTube videos of what look, to my untrained eye, like acceptable performance with the settings turned way down for a young kid, but I don't know how important that is. Still, the Stream seems like as good as you can get for the money.
 

Skipoosh

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I would be glad to help you with this, as you mentioned, minecraft isn't as light of a game as you would think, and can be fairly demanding with slower computers. One correction can be made to what you said, onboard graphics are NOT needed to play minecraft, they are certainly helpful, but I could play pefectly fine on my old thinkpad with integrated graphics from 2007. Now, on to the topic, the stream 14 is a decent computer for minecraft and will probably run in low-medium settings at a playable framerate(smoothness), but it will struggle on most other things, not to mention, the 32gb ssd will fill up very quickly, with around 15gb left over after windows 8 is installed. But for $300 that is pretty much the best you will find, however, if the budget becomes $400, than the tables turn, take a look at this:http://www.bestbuy.com/site/acer-aspire-15-6-touch-screen-laptop-intel-core-i5-4gb-memory-500gb-hard-drive-midnight-black/8274088.p?id=1219321335266&skuId=8274088&ref=199&loc=vfjoCcdk2O4&acampID=1&siteID=vfjoCcdk2O4-NBqJnrBGa3CWEuKQPgbP.g Yes, I understand this is outside your budget, but this laptop is much, much better than the stream 14, it is not as elegant looking, but in terms of performance, it blows the stream 14 out of the water. For starters, it includes an i5 cpu with almost double the clock speed+hyperthreading, and its intel. Also, the graphics is intel hd 4400, compared to the r3 graphics in the stream 14. Finally, it includes 4gb ram vs 2gb ram and a 500gb hdd vs a 32gb sdd. Judging by your original review, you aren't a very techy person, so I will translate. For $100 more, you get around 5x the general computing performance and speed, plus 15x as much storage. Also, in terms of gaming, this computer will take minecraft at high settings no problem, running a silky smooth framerate of over 30, depending on the graphics.(20 is playable, 30 is smooth, 60 is like butter) Also, when he grows up in a few years and wants to venture into other PC games, this computer will be there to help him, while the stream likely won't have enough free space to even download them. As of right now, one of the most demanding games is likely Battlefield 4(rated M, not appropriate for him but I will use it as an example). This game features extremely realistic graphics and 64 player multiplayer, all in realtime. This computer, could handle the game at around 20-30 frames per second on the lowest settings. While the stream 14 wouldn't be able to download the game because of space, and even if it could, might get around 3 or 4 frames per second with even lower graphics.(the equivalent of flipping through a photo album quickly). Overall, if they are on a tight budget, the stream 14 will cut it, but the acer I recommended for $100 more will be MUCH more future-proof, otherwise they will be spending another few hundred dollars in a few years for a computer capable of playing newer games. Hoped this helps and feel free to ask questions if needed :).

EDIT: the reason I said stream 14 was because I found it while searching, the 14 is many more times more powerful than the 13
 

Skipoosh

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I cannot believe I missed this, but apparently I somehow slipped past this laptop. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/toshiba-satellite-15-6-laptop-amd-a8-series-4gb-memory-500gb-hard-drive-jet-black/8790174.p?id=1219370472837&skuId=8790174

Compared to the previously mentioned laptop, it is around 3/4 as fast, but it fits in your price range at $299. I recommend this over the stream 14 in every way unless they care about aesthetics. But in terms of speed, this crushes the 14 and is the best laptop available for the price that I can find at the moment.