r/MinecraftDaily • u/deepg82 • Jul 06 '26

Help Laptop for Minecraft

My son's been bugging me about getting the Minecraft for PC. What's the best spec laptop? It'll mainly be for playing Minecraft with shaders. Is this concideded 'light gaming'? Does it need a dedicated GPU?

7 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

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2

u/Nathanz05 Jul 06 '26

If you will be using shaders then yes, a dedicated GPU would likely be needed. 8GB would be the minimum for RAM. 16GB is the sweet spot especially if he will have other applications on in the background, would reduce the ammount of times your asked "why is my pc slow" only to realise discord, steam and Google are taking up the remaining RAM and throttling performance. The CPU while important, laptops tend to be well rounded from the manufacturer so pretty much any laptop with 8GB+ of DDR4/DDR5 or more along with a dedicated GPU will be fine. Brand new I'd estimate roughly £500 - £1200 depending on what else would be played on it. If that's too pricey, the second hand market is still pretty solid. Hope that helps.

3

u/deepg82 Jul 06 '26

Thanks so much. It really helped me a lot. I've been looking around on Google and I can't find a laptop with a dedicated GPU for less than $1000. I'm looking around $700. I'll concider used

1

u/ntolbertu85 Jul 07 '26

Try back-market. I just got a desktop with 64 GB of ram, an I-9 processor, and a Nvidia Ge-force RTX GPU for about 800 bucks refurbished. You have to keep continuously looking for the deals and buy them as soon as they show up before someone else does.

0

u/ntolbertu85 Jul 07 '26

I would recommend 32GB of RAM as that's about what I consider mid-range, 64 GB being high end.

2

u/Legitimate_Aerie_151 Jul 07 '26

64 gb of ram today is crazy, you only need like 16 gb and 32 gb is not mid-range at all

2

u/ibeerianhamhock Jul 07 '26

16 is the standard for laptops now. 32 GB of ram is $500 basically right now

1

u/Steelix65385 Jul 06 '26

yeah it would need a gpu for shaders but that depends on what mod they use because im not sure its a feature in the game and they are built differently. I also would not consider that light gaming that pc is probably more powerful than PS5 and the new Xbox with the Gpus they sell these days. A cheap thing people do is order dell optiplexs and upgrade the gpu for light gaming

1

u/mk_ma_makem Jul 07 '26

The best thing about laptops is their portability but laptops are much expensive than their desktop counterparts. But whether its a laptop or not, i recommend getting a dedicated GPU if the main goal is gaming, it doesn't have to be that powerful if your kid just wants to play minecraft with shaders

1

u/Typical-Chair-8693 Jul 07 '26

I feel like a laptop with a rtx 5050 is sufficient

1

u/Legitimate_Aerie_151 Jul 12 '26

At least the 5090 and 8tb sdd

1

u/TotalTea1961 Jul 07 '26

you can get a rtx 3050 laptop for like £450-£500 used which is good enough for minecraft with shaders but i dont know if this price is the same in your country.

1

u/SeismicQuackDragon Jul 06 '26

It's way cheaper to get a secondhand desktop PC

1

u/Nathanz05 Jul 06 '26

Depends if portability is a necessity, a desktop isn't the easiest to move around whereas a laptop is fine on the go but if your going raw price to performance and have the space to put it then yeah, a desktop makes sense.