Gaming laptop under 300$

[Darianf2906]

Looking for a good gaming laptop that can run simple games like minecraft and things like that without any lagg up to medium settings or higher

 

[Solandri]

Minecraft is not very GPU-intensive. Any Intel i3, i5, or i7 laptop should work. Here's a video of Minecraft running at 1920x1080 on Intel HD4400 video (integrated Haswell i3/i5 graphics).

https/www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQjfTzpqG90&noredirect=1

Expect Ivy Bridge laptops to be about 20% slower. Sandy Bridge laptops to be another 20% slower. Avoid older (Nehalem) i3/i5 laptops and Celeron/Pentium laptops - those use the oldest Intel HD graphics, which lose about 50% speed from Sandy Bridge.

The AMD laptops generally use a better GPU than Intel integrated graphics, so should be able to run Minecraft as well. But they tend to combine with a weaker CPU, so overall it's a wash.

Here's a list of various integrated graphics cards and how they perform in various games. You can click on the particular graphics card to get more benchmarks and its fps in even more games.

http/www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-Games-on-Laptop-Graphic-Cards.13849.0.html

 

[hang-the-9]

You need to double your budget for a gaming laptop even for lower settings on newer gams.

Minecraft may be OK on lower settings without mods on a regular i5 system. i3 may be a bit too slow.

Either way, won't be for $300 unless you get a used system. For $300 you are looking at basic laptops that can browse the web and watch movies. A system to handle games even on low settings would be about $500, anything less you will wish you spent the extra money. Just look at craigslist and all of the cheap laptops people buy, keep for a month then realize it's too slow to do anythig with and sell for 1/2 the price. You don't often see fast new systems for sale, but a ton of low end stuff.

I'd think about a used system in your price range if you want to play games on it, a 2-3 yr old laptop that used to be $800 new is a lot better than a $300 new system. Just make sure you see it running without crashing for a bit, runnng a benchmark like 3DMark would be a good test.