best laptop for heavily modded minecraft?

sof_dawg · February 29

i know nothing about computers or laptops so i’m looking for any help i can get!! i’m looking for a gaming laptop that can run around 300 minecraft mods smoothly and a couple additional games such as sims and steam games. i can be flexible with price, i honestly just have no idea what to look for. any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!!!

Rye_Bread · March 4

Hi, sof_dawg!

First of all, thanks for joining our community! We're happy to have you.

I've got a good friend of mine who not only works for a Minecraft server hosting company but also is a mod dev, so I verified some of my current knowledge with him (and even learned a few things myself).

Minecraft heavily favors single-core performance, and is also more CPU bound than GPU bound. Keeping this in mind, I would highly recommend going with an Intel Core i7 or an i9. The Ryzen processors are also great, but they fall behind a little bit when it comes to single-core performance. The Intel processors—for Minecraft specifically—will get you a little better bang-for-the-buck.

The GPU becomes an important factor when looking at other games, as most games aren't as CPU bound as something like Minecraft is. Speaking of Minecraft, if you intend to run shaders then the GPU suddenly becomes a lot more important. To keep up with most modern games plus the potential for shaders, I would start at the RTX 4060 and go up from there depending on where the budget falls. Some shaders tend to get very demanding, so going with a higher end GPU isn't necessarily a bad idea either. I find the 4070 is a nice sweet spot right now.

RAM is the next thing to discuss. Modded Minecraft runs best when you allocate 10GB of RAM to it, more tends to result in diminishing returns. You could certainly get away with 16GB if you don't plan on hosting any servers nor doing many other background tasks. However, if you're like me and you have 10+ Chrome tabs open, Discord, Spotify, and other random apps open as well, then I would bump up to 32GB to keep everything nice and smooth. Additionally, if you plan on hosting a server locally, you're going to want to allocate at least 6GB RAM to keep things running well. The more the merrier in this case. For these reasons, I would personally recommend 32GB that way you have the flexibility to multitask and host a local server.

The rest is pretty subjective! I love having a nice 1440p screen on laptops, plus plenty of storage for all of my games. Linked below are a some options we carry that are some of my favorites and would be perfect for heavily modded Minecraft:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/664253/acer-nitro-17-an17-51-70cb-173-gaming-laptop-computer-platinum-collection-black

https://www.microcenter.com/product/671890/hp-omen-transcend-16-u0078nr-16-gaming-laptop-computer-shadow-black

https://www.microcenter.com/product/663735/lenovo-legion-pro-5-16-gaming-laptop-computer-platinum-collection-onyx-grey

https://www.microcenter.com/product/663213/msi-raider-ge78hx-13vg-020us-173-gaming-laptop-computer-platinum-collection-dark-grey

https://www.microcenter.com/product/669519/acer-predator-helios-16-ph16-71-91fl-160-gaming-laptop-computer-abyssal-black

https://www.microcenter.com/product/663124/asus-rog-strix-scar-16-g634jz-xs96-16-gaming-laptop-computer-black

Whew, that was a lot! Hopefully that covered everything you wanted to know. Let me know if I did or didn't, or if you have other questions.