New laptop for a 10 year old who plays Minecraft?

kookookaty

Hello
I'd really appreciate some help with choosing a laptop for my son who has saved up £400 to buy himself a laptop. He will use it for Minecraft etc, web browsing and school work. Do I need one with a dedicated graphics card and how much memory and hard-drive should I look out for? I've been looking at Lenovo Z50 and G50 but am really at a loss to knowing which specs are and are not essential. Any help much appreciated.
Thanks
Katy

Fightsback

Does it have to be a laptop ?

A desktop will give you a much better gaming performance (i.e. Minecraft) for your £

Another point is 10 year old boys (and girls) have a habit of breaking electronics that can be moved around, speaking from my own experiences

Cisco001

for that price range, the best I can find is
HP Pavilion 15-ab059na Laptop £410@ ebuyer
AMD Quad-Core A10-8700P APU 1.8GHz
8GB RAM + 1TB HDD
15.6" + AMD Radeon R7 M360
Webcam + Bluetooth
Windows 8.1 64bit

kookookaty

Thank you. He definitely wants a laptop that he can transport around easily. I will look into the suggestion but I have also found this
http://www.tesco.com/direct/asus-x550ca-156-notebook-intel-core-i3-6gb-ram-1tb-black/452-0574.prd?skuId=452-0574
2-0574
But am worried the Intel graphics won't be good enough or is that just what professional gamers would say and is it fine for a bit of Minecraft?
Thanks

Pennywise

You really need a dedicated graphics card for Minecraft rather than an integrated card. We got our DS a decent spec laptop with an integrated graphics card and he was really frustrated with it as it just wasn't fast enough. He'd back to using my older laptop with a slower processor, lower memory but a dedicated graphics card which he tells us is a lot better for playing Minecraft!

Richie-from-the-Boro

The Blocky/Pixelated 8 bit style graphics of minecraft [digital lego] looks and was disgustingly under-programmed when the game was designed, considering the price of the platform needed to play it on. I had to pay £480 [after VAT back] for a top end lenovo for my great-grandaughters xmas just to play this one single game. But then I would have bought her a car if she asked me - that's grand-dads for you, BTW she was 7 at the time.

Pennywise & Fightsback are right for different reasons. You can get the graphics sorted but be careful

robatwork

You really need a proper graphics card rather than the standard Intel. For minecraft and whatever he wants to play in 2 years time which will doubtless need something less blocky.

You will struggle at that budget. Best I can find is

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/hewlett-packard-hp-pavilion-15-ab056na-a8-7410-12gb-1tb-amd-r7m360-2gb-15.6-m2y90ea/version.asp

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/a1-refurbished-lenovo-z50-70-intel-core-i5-4210u-8gb-1tb-sshd-dvd-rw-15.6-a1-59423078/version.asp

Fightsback

Be quick, ends today £410

http://www.medion.com/gb/shop/multimedia-laptops-medion-akoya-p6655-laptop-md99138-30018530a1.html?wt_mc=gb.intern.StdProducts.welcome.on-ma&wt_cc1=1_1&wt_cc3=DEAL%20OF%20THE%20DAY

It has an Nvidia GTX 930M discrete graphics card

Ilija

It should work on integrated graphic, just don't know how well.
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
I've quickly browsed through amazon.co.uk and you can find quite good laptops under £400.

Lenovo Z50 - 80EC000QUK - 15.6 inch Quad Core Laptop AMD A10-7300 / 1.90 GHz (3.20 GHz Turbo) Processor, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, AMD Radeon R6 M255DX 2GB Dedicated Graphics £399