Minecraft Guidance

[jronald]

Minecraft Guidance

Uby has been using a T60p 15 inch and it works fine.
Whats out there possibly newer that would work.
He is hell on laptops, so cheap parts are the order of the day.

Thanks
Ron

[Saucey]

It is joked that Minecraft was written so poorly in Java that it takes more processing power then it should.
That coupled with its blocky graphics, quite a few people in the gaming community who are not part of the Minecraft scene (First Person Shooters for example) make fun of what kind of PC is needed to be built for that game to run smoothly, when other games look and play stellar needing less power.

Perhaps a W500 would fit the bill better, they aren't as pricey as a W510.
Do want to get that Dell E6410 once I sell the T410 so I can game lightly...

I'd say get a cooling mat and external keyboard for the time being.
It wasn't needed on my T60p when I played League of Legends at home, but doing that eased my state of mind when it comes to overheating or FPS/latency issues.

[jronald]

$125.00 ........Times 3, 4 or 6 a year, dont think so.
Maybe Im stuck with T60ps


Ron

[RealBlackStuff]

Panasonic Toughbook comes to mind.
Models CF-50 and CF-51 have 15" screens.
Example here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/261737991141
There are quite a few other models around (such as CF-31) that are probably stronger than the above.
Someone in-the-know please chime in!

[pianowizard]

He is hell on laptops

Get him a desktop. You can find a desktop that's much more powerful than your T60p for less than $80.

[jronald]

He wants to be with us while glued to the laptop. Desktop is a non-starter. He has one anyway, its called an MP3 player, runs 24/7 365 in his room.

I think I like the Toughbook idea, provide the cost is where I need it.

UPDATE: Toughbooks are not cheap
he is not rough on them per se' no physical damage, I just cant keep Mobo in the T60. Ideally it needs to be a V5250 to run Mincraft decently. Wonder if a T61 with Intel would run OK?



Ron

[ajkula66]

Wonder if a T61 with Intel would run OK?

Probably not.

You'd need one with nVidia GPU for Minecraft to run anything close to smooth.

Not sure about V5250 being a requirement, though. My daughter has been getting away with X1400+T7400+3GB RAM+Intel SLC SSD for quite some time now, although she doesn't play it on her T60 as much nowadays...

[Medessec]

I've found that my T601 Frankie handles Minecraft far better than my ATI T60s. The W500 in my experience also runs Minecraft adequately for regular gameplay.

My British friend has played with Minecraft's code, and he tells me the same thing each time: Minecraft is one of the worst games he's ever seen from a programming standpoint. The reason it's so bad owes mostly to the chunkloading and block generation engines- but the rendering is in OpenGL and is usually raw geometry, which is unbelievably harsh on older machines.

Thinkpads like the W500 get by playing it because of their exceptional engineering- machines with similar hardware but poorer cooling and thermal profile usually have huge issues with lag spikes and freeze-ups on certain sections of the game. But don't think the W500 gets away with it completely- MC abuses the laptop's older CPU with horrid garbage collection and memory management, on top of all the calculations done by the entities, mob logic(the monsters) and the world generation and chunkloading.

Aspects of computing that help Minecraft:
- Extreme single or dual-core power(Desktop CPUs starting first-gen Core i-series, with extremely high clock speeds are perfect)
- SSD(World and chunkloading is much faster and far less glitchy)
- High amounts of RAM. At least 4GB is necessary for smooth gameplay.
- 64-bit Java. Needed to use the excessive amounts of RAM that MC hogs.

Another good option is to download and run OptiFine in your client. There's several ways of installing it, see here: http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/ma ... ures-aa-af

[jronald]

OK picked up a T61 Intel graphics for a song.

I have the factory Vista recovery discs, and access to W7. (Current is XP) Which of the two OS's are least likely to cause issues?
Its a 2gig CPU with 2 gig of ram. Whats the sweet spot on the memory? Based on which OS?

Thanks
Ron

[ajkula66]

Whats the sweet spot on the memory? Based on which OS?

3GB for the 32-bit and 4GB for the 64-bit, Vista/W7 doesn't really make much of a difference in my experience.

[jronald]

10-4


Thanks
Ron