What is the Best Computer to Play Minecraft On?

You’ve no doubt heard about the current reigning champion of freeware games for the PC. As we pass the half-decade mark of Minecraft’s inception, the game’s unique ability to capture both casual gamers and the more selective indie-gaming crowd has the newer generation of players wondering what all the fuss is about.

The premise for Minecraft is simple: use your creativity to build almost any construct from blocks. Of course, it doesn’t stop there – have all the fun you want during the daytime, but the setting sun is like a tolling bell for the frightening monsters that will descend on the world of Minecraft. Your constructs will need to protect you from these beasts.

Gaming PC for Minecraft

As for the computer you’ll need to play Minecraft, although it is a relatively low-requirement game, you’re better off searching for a capable gaming PC because of the countless possible upgrades and multi-player Co-op features. This brings us to the handful of things you should consider when shopping for a gaming PC that can handle anything Minecraft throws at you, as well as other graphics-intensive games you might play.

When it comes to processing power for games, two things matter most: the CPU and the GPU. The central processing unit (CPU) helps your computer perform actions faster, so if you like to play games over a network that is turn-based; a faster CPU might be your best bet. On the other hand, the graphics processing unit (GPU) is what allows those high-resolution games to show up without pixels, etc. For Minecraft specifically, you might want to opt for a better CPU for fast rendering of the worlds you’re going to create.
Graphics are a big consideration for most modern PC games; however, this is a big plus for Minecraft – it isn’t a graphics-intensive game. You still want a computer with an adequate graphics-card, however; look to the AMD Radeon and Nvidia as the leaders in graphics card manufacturing. As your creativity kicks into high-gear and your abilities grow in Minecraft, you’ll want your pixilated constructs to look expansive and show the crisp detail you put into them. The best advice is to spend on the graphics card more than any other extra component – even if the PC game you want to play most is CPU-oriented. The card takes a load off your base system, which almost certainly wouldn’t be able to handle most modern games without a good card. Avoid spending more than about a third of the cost of your entire computer system on a graphics card.
Pay attention to the CPU Motherboard. For Minecraft, most of them (nearly all of them, really) will work fine; but for other games, you don’t want to identify the perfect Nvidia graphics card SLI or Radeon Crossfire setup, only to learn that the Motherboard of your new computer doesn’t support one or the other. The good thing is that those days are quickly passing us by, and modern and next-generation Motherboards are fully compatible with either.
Lastly, out of the most pertinent things you need to compare before getting a PC for Minecraft, is the onboard random access memory. RAM, when it comes to gaming, is important because of how much bandwidth and processing power some games can take. Avoid going any lower than about 8 GB of memory; this will allow you to have plenty of background tasks running while taking a break from work or school to play Minecraft. As for more specifics, you can go with DDR3 or DDR5, with the higher number being better. However, DDR3 is relatively inexpensive these days, and will certainly do for a PC game like Minecraft and most others.