Minecraft rig for 10 year old.

Do-more

Based on a suggested build in another thread here I have put together the following:



The PC is for my 10 year old who is a Minecraft freak. Not sure how long more that is going to last but between playing Minecraft, making skins, watching YouTube and Skype that's all his current PC is used for.

It's an old Dell Dimension 3000 with a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 processor which appears to be only just about able to run Minecraft since the latest update.

I'm guessing that the above build should be a huge jump up in capability but is it the most appropriate combination of components? Have I made any mistakes?

Is there any cost effective upgrades that I should consider?

The OS in his current PC has been upgraded from OEM XP to WIN7 on a family pack upgrade. Will I be able to use this hard drive (or an image of it) in the new PC or because it was upgraded from an OEM version does that mean it is linked to the motherboard?

Any advice greatly appreciated, it's the first time I have purchased a spec built PC.

urabell

Buy him an xbox, healthier piece of kit for a younglad, he'll be able to play minecraft on it and hopefully move on to FIFA and COD which are altogether more socially acceptable games (if not as innovative or highly rated by 'gamer's). You'll thank me when he's captain of the rugby team and has the local princess on his arm at his debs instead of combing his neckbeard.

KilOit

Do-more wrote: »

Based on a suggested build in another thread here I have put together the following:



The PC is for my 10 year old who is a Minecraft freak. Not sure how long more that is going to last but between playing Minecraft, making skins, watching YouTube and Skype that's all his current PC is used for ...Now

Anyways any pc will play Minecraft, why not look at second hand stuff people sell on adverts, get all the bits and bobs for a decent price

mayordenis

Just my 2 cents, wouldn't be as knowledgeable as most on here, but I have a system very similar to that (only major difference being a older i3 3220, and 8gb of ram instead of the 4gb you're going for) anyway it's served me very well running a treat, plays plenty of games on 1080p on medium settings perfectly (not arsed with Battlefield 4 or extremely high end stuff, but reckon it could handle it to a degree).

With regards the OS I think you can deregister it from PC and use the same key on another, someone here will know more about that than I would.

Do-more

urabell wrote: »

Buy him an xbox, healthier piece of kit for a younglad, he'll be able to play minecraft on it and hopefully move on to FIFA and COD which are altogether more socially acceptable games (if not as innovative or highly rated by 'gamer's). You'll thank me when he's captain of the rugby team and has the local princess on his arm at his debs instead of combing his neckbeard.

I would go for the XBOX 360, much cheaper solution but he plays on a server with all his mates and he tells me he couldn't do that with the XBOX version. Only going on his word for that I presume it's correct.

markbreen17

With regards to deactivating a windows copy, this worked for me on windows 8, worth a shot on 7!
Open a Command prompt (admin) and type :
slmgr.vbs -upk
Hit enter.

EoinHef

You could go for a fx-6300 cpu and change the motherboard to a am3+ socket for about €10 more and you should get better performance with less need to upgrade down the line. Just adding a new graphics card in a year or so would be a nice upgrade with the 6300 processor and you would be fine for another while. But the card you selected would do for now.

If your going for 4gb of ram I would get a 1x4gb stick rather than 2x2gb so you can easily upgrade later and just add an extra stick for 8gb, with high resolution texture packs these days minecraft can use a lot of ram.

The OS is a tricky one, oem copies are linked to the motherboard alright but you upgraded to windows 7 from xp so not sure how that would work. You can downlaod the windows 7 trial and activate it with a key from amazon, usually costs around €50 if worst came to worst.
Is the drive in the existing pc ide or sata? If its sata connection you could try it in the new pc and if it doesnt work go the amazon route.

The thing about games like minecraft on console is its not moddable, its only vanilla so its not really the same playing it on console. Minecraft is such a different game on PC to console

uncle_sam_ie

Do-more wrote: »

I would go for the XBOX 360, much cheaper solution but he plays on a server with all his mates and he tells me he couldn't do that with the XBOX version. Only going on his word for that I presume it's correct.

Yeah he is correct, minecraft on the XBOX is very limiting so it's not the same. I built a similar system for my son last year. The upfront cost is more but once that's over with gaming on a PC will work out a lot cheaper for you. You should try and build it yourself though. It's a lot easier than you might think. Plus, you'll be in a better position if something goes wrong down the road to fix it yourself.

SterlingArcher

Did you use the discount site for hardwareversand.de .....

Geizhals.de

Do-more

SterlingArcher wrote: »

Did you use the discount site for hardwareversand.de .....

Geizhals.de

Yep, did that.

Thanks for all the replies folks, I'll just have to suck it and see with the OS. I'm not sure if the existing HD is sata possibly not but I have a 1 TB drive in a NAS that is not in use so I was going to clone the existing drive to it first if I can.

Will take a look at the other suggestions re. motherboard/processor and ram before I order.

[Edit] Just checked and the Win7 on his machine is a full licence not from the family pack upgrades so I'll have no problems in deactivating it and using it for a fresh install on the new machine.

ArnieSilvia

If you're interested I'll be selling on adverts a mobo/CPU/RAM bundle soon for 120 euro mark that has been proven to work very well with Minecraft. I had a P4 before as well (packed up) and difference is night and day. Have another PC (got carried away with building) with Phenom 955BE 8GB I built for my racing games and it's an overkill, CPU works at 20% load most of time (2% load at idle on Win 7), memory use is 20% most of time. So bundle below would be a sweet spot for the required task with enough headroom for a price I paid for Phenom CPU alone.

The bundle:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 3Ghz with cooler and fan
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4
4GB DDR2 memory (Corsair IIRC)
Chipset Nvidia NForce SLI - you can use 2 Nvidia graphics cards if you want

I can include a good Gainward Nvidia GeForce 9800GT (well enough for Minecraft, racing games etc) I had with this setup for another 50 euro.