ClubMinecraft laptop recommendations
Minecraft laptop recommendations
Below you will find our recommendations for laptops to play Minecraft on, also what you should expect to get for your money. In addition, we will explore the graphics options that will allow you to adjust Minecraft to run at its best on your laptop
At Club Minecraft, we encourage the players to move onto the PC platform to play, as this provides the most options for the players and for us to provide for. One of the nice things about Minecraft is that it is written in Java, so it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Unfortunately, while most laptops can run Minecraft, not all of them do it well. Java is slow, so Minecraft really needs a powerful processor and plenty of memory to be playable. Although the graphics are intentionally blocky, things like viewing distance, textures, and lighting effects, add to the challenge. When the computer does not have enough power, Minecraft runs slowly and can become laggy and unplayable
Club Minecraft, a laptop is going to be the best. It is lightweight and portable, so it is easy to bring along. That said, the specifications and options below directly translate to desktop computers too
What is the spec?
When looking at buying a laptop to run Minecraft, at a minimum you will need an AMD Ryzen 3 or an Intel Core i3 processor. You will also need at least 8GB of memory [RAM]. While all the processors in laptops, have integrated graphics, which will work fine at most settings, a dedicated graphics chip will improve many settings of the game, and will sort them out. This comes down to budget, how much you are willing to spend, how much shopping around you do, and how confident you feel about buying second hand or refurbished laptops.
What are the parts?
The processor AMD and Intel are always releasing new generations of processors; however, previous generations are still worth buying. You can look for AMD Ryzen 2xxx to 5xxx processors, or Intel processors with 4xxx to 11xxx part numbers. You should avoid any of the low voltage versions, AMDs E1, E2 or Microprocessors, and Intel Celeron, Pentium and Atom processors, as they will not have enough power to run the game and will cause a lot of lag to the game.
The memory Memory, or RAM, is where the games will run from when played. Given that the operating system will also need to use some of the RAM, we suggest 8GB at a minimum. Most Laptops will come with 4, 8, or 16GB installed, and have expansion slots for you to upgrade them if needed, we recommend for the latest versions of Minecraft that a computer has 8GB RAM minimum
The graphics AMD and Intel have been improving their integrated graphics every single year with laptops, so there is less reason to insist on a dedicated graphics chip. From experience, most current processors with integrated graphics are fine for Minecraft.
Laptop choices
Entry-level [£300-£500] An Entry Level Laptop will have an AMD Ryzen 3 or 5, alternatively, a core i3 or i5 processor, there is also options for slightly older 4th to 8th generations, or sometimes even 11th intel processors, there is also AMD new line up of Ryzen 5 4xxx-5xxx Series for this price cap also, which with their integrated GPUs do much better than intels option.
Mid-range [£500-£800] A reasonable mid-range laptop will have an AMD Ryzen 5 or 7, alternatively, a Core i5 or i7 processer will also do, with slightly older i5 4XXX to 9XXX generation core processer also being fine to run Minecraft. As well as older Ryzen 5 2XXX to 4XXX processors. You will want 8GB of RAM and an SSD [Solid State Drive] above 250GB These laptops will again come with Windows 10 or 11 depending on where you purchase it and will play Minecraft at medium settings, these laptops will have a dedicated GPU mainly an Nvidia Graphics card, so always look for one of them at this price. If you look around, you may find a professionally refurbished model for £400-£600 containing older processors and dedicated graphics.
High end [£800-£1200] A high-end laptop will have a AMD Ryzen 7. In addition, you can look at i7 11XXX or 10XXX. At this price range you will be looking for a dedicated graphics card also with Nvidia or AMD dedicated graphics, at this price range you can expect a 30 series Nvidia or an AMD Radeon 6000 series, 16GB of RAM will be wanted as will a Solid-State Hard drive [SSDs]. These are a new type of hard drive without moving parts and are up to x100 times faster than mechanical types [HDDs] The laptops will also have a Full HD screen showing 1920 x 1080 pixels and run at a refresh rate of 120Hz or more, for high refresh rate smooth gaming.
Ultra end [£1200+] A Ultra-end laptop will have a have a Ryzen 7 and also Intel i7 11XXX. At the Ultra price range, a dedicated graphics card will come with the 30 Series Nvidia and also have AMD Radeon 6000 Series, 16GB will be wanted, and can be upgraded to 32GB RAM on some models, this allows to play Minecraft with big texture packs, and playing lots of mod packs and running mini servers with this type of power in a computer.
Optimizing Minecraft
One simple tip for running Minecraft is to avoid running anything else at the same time, closing other open windows or background programs will help to free up the resource on the computer for the game to use.
In-game, there are a variety of graphical options that will help performance; they can be adjusted in the Video Settings screen.
| Graphics | Fancy and Fabolous is more resource-intensive; it turns on shadow rendering, dynamic water, volumetric clouds, and transparent leaves, among other things. Switch to Fast to disable the effects and increase FPS. |
| Resolution | This is the resolution the game will run at, the best resolution to run at is the current setting, as this matches your computers monitor screen size, and scaling. FPS. |
| Biome Blend | Biome blend adds a gradient between different biomes in textures, turning this setting lower will increase performance |
| Render Distance | in 1.18 you now have two render distances, Render distance is how far the Minecraft engine renders the game, in chunks, from the players current position. Lowering this number increases FPS. |
| Simulation Distance | in 1.18 you now have two render distances, Simulation distance is based on how far you are rendering and updating the entities and the chunks, Lowering this down will increase FPS. |
| Chunk Builder | Semi Blocking, Fully blocking, threaded, threaded is the best for performance, whereas full blocking is the most intensive, but can prevent occasional visual bugs you might see during the game. |
| Smooth Lighting | This setting has a very minimal effect on performance; we suggest leaving it on because toggling it to the lower settings is pretty ugly [and you gain very little FPS boost in return]. |
| Max Framerate | This section is actually a bit counterintuitive. Your computer cannot display a frame rather higher than the refresh rate of the monitor so limiting it to the refresh rate of your monitor 60, or 120, 144hz] is recommended. |
| 3D Anaglyph | For use with traditional red-blue 3D glasses. |
| View Bobbing | When on, the players head bobs slightly while walking; when off, the view is stable. |
| GUI Scale | Adjusts the onscreen display [e.g. quick access bar and health/hunger]. If you are playing on a very large monitor and find the GUI to be too small, you can fix it here. |
| Clouds | Turning the clouds off offers a minor increase in performance. |
| Brightness | No effect on performance, simply a gamma-style adjustment of in-game light levels. |
| Particles | Turning off particles, [e.g. the smoke from torches, fireworks, water droplets, lava particles] offers a medium increase in performance. |
| Fullscreen | Switching the game to full-screen mode can increase performance as more of the GPU is directed explicitly toward the game. |
| Use Vsync | Vsync locks your frame rate to the refresh rate of your monitor. Turn this off if you are routinely getting less than the refresh rate of your monitor [e.g. your monitor is 60Hz but you usually only get 25FPS] because it can cause lag and annoying stuttering of the on-screen image. |
| Mipmap Levels | Higher levels offer higher texture smoothing; decreasing Mipmap level can increase performance but at the cost of uglier textures. |
| Autosave Indicator | Shows you the autosave indicator. |
| Attack Indicator | Attack indicator changes the cooldown position to be either in the hotbar, or by the crosshair, or not on. |
| Entity Distance | Entity Distance modifies the maximum distance that entities such as dropped items mobs and minecarts appear to the user. |
| Entity Shadows | This shows the shadow of the entity in the game, turning this off gives you minor performance |
| Distortion effects | Controls the intensity of distortion effects like portal and nausea effects, this does not affect performance |
| FOV effects | Controls the intensity of FOV effects like bow drawing sprinting and flying, this does not affect performance |