£300 Minecraft Build

[DaleTheWhale]

Right,

So my brothers friend is after a Minecraft/Gmod build as he wants to play with my brother.

So, as I already know, this is a silly budget but doable, I have a PSU, Case & OS ready for him (Selling for £30) so that's out the way. I'm looking for advice on whether the APU or Pentium is the way forward here?

Intel Pentium:

YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI Radeon R7 260X OC 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £77.99
1 x TeamGroup Xtreem LV "Frost Edition" 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-21300C11 2666MHz Dual Channel Kit £59.99
1 x Intel Pentium K Anniversary G3258 Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £55.99
1 x Gigabyte H81M-S2PV Intel H81 (Socket 1150) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard £39.95
1 x Toshiba (7K1000.D) 500GB SATA 6GB/s 32MB Cache - OEM (DT01ACA050) HDD £35.99
1 x Pioneer 24x Internal DVR-221LBK DVD Rewriter - OEM £13.49
Total : £292.99 (includes shipping : £8.00).




AMD APU:

YOUR BASKET
1 x AMD Kaveri 7700K 10 Compute Core APU w/ Radeon R7 Graphics (4 CPU + 6 GPU Compute Cores) - Retail £109.99
1 x TeamGroup Xtreem LV "Frost Edition" 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-21300C11 2666MHz Dual Channel Kit £59.99
1 x Gigabyte F2A88XM-DS2 AMD A88X (Socket FM2+) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard £38.99
1 x Toshiba (7K1000.D) 500GB SATA 6GB/s 32MB Cache - OEM (DT01ACA050) HDD £35.99
1 x Pioneer 24x Internal DVR-221LBK DVD Rewriter - OEM £13.49
Total : £258.44 (includes shipping : ).



Intel seems a better choice...

 

[Danny75]

My thoughts:


YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI Radeon R7 260X OC 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £77.99
1 x Gigabyte Z97P-D3 Intel Z97 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £61.99
1 x Intel Pentium K Anniversary G3258 Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £55.99
1 x Toshiba (7K1000.D) 500GB SATA 6GB/s 32MB Cache - OEM (DT01ACA050) HDD £35.99
1 x Kingston HyperX Fury Black 4GB (1x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz Single Channel Kit (HX316C10FB/4) £32.99
1 x Raijintek Aidos Direct Contact CPU Cooler - Black £14.99
1 x Pioneer 24x Internal DVR-221LBK DVD Rewriter - OEM £13.49
Total : £303.02 (includes shipping : £8.00).




Cut RAM to one 4GB stick to allow for Z97 mobo and cooler to get more out of the Pentium, and because it's easier to stick in another RAM module than to tinker with changing motherboard for a CPU upgrade.

Minecraft system requirements
Last Updated: Jul 22, 2014 09:09PM CEST

Minimum Requirements:
CPU: Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 (K8) 2.6 GHz
RAM: 2GB
GPU (Integrated): Intel HD Graphics or AMD (formerly ATI) Radeon HD Graphics with OpenGL 2.1
GPU (Discrete): Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT or AMD Radeon HD 2400 with OpenGL 3.1
HDD: At least 200MB for Game Core and Other Files
Java 6 Release 45

Recommended Requirements:
CPU: Intel Core i3 or AMD Athlon II (K10) 2.8 GHz
RAM: 4GB
GPU: GeForce 2xx Series or AMD Radeon HD 5xxx Series (Excluding Integrated Chipsets) with OpenGL 3.3
HDD: 1GB
Latest release of Java 7 from java.com

https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/325948-minecraft-system-requirements

The sacrifice might be the Page File getting used now and then (despite 4GB RAM recommended) if he plays too long, but I think the benefits outweigh the negatives.

 

[Orcvader]

Intel + a discrete GPU will be the way to go, will also handle heavier games if he feels like playing some.

Also, I would suggest installing Optifine as well, this vastly improves the performance of Minecraft.

 

[DaleTheWhale]

Intel + a discrete GPU will be the way to go, will also handle heavier games if he feels like playing some.

Also, I would suggest installing Optifine as well, this vastly improves the performance of Minecraft.

Thanks for the idea of 4GB RAM now, and then some later definitely a valid choice to make.

Optifine is always my suggestion as well for Minecraft builds.
Have a selection of performance mods I will be adding for him.

 

[Mantaray]

make sure u u use 64bit os ... 32 bit doesnt play well with java 7 and u have to manually set maxmem level to 1 gig if it does ,, even though u have 4 gig, but not on all systems