Minecraft on a Dell Latitude 6420 Laptop?

My 12 year old son wants to play Minecraft, but currently he has an old hand-me-down computer still running XP that will not work for that.

We want to get him an inexpensive computer, but a laptop so he’ll be able to use in school at least through the rest of this and hopefully the next school year. I found a place that sells refurbished computers cheap and had a good experience buying our younger 9 year old son a Dell Optiplex desktop for him to make stop-motion Lego videos.

They have Dell Latitude 6420 laptops for $280, which will be more than adequate for school purposes, but I’m wondering if my 12 year old will be able to play Minecraft on it as well. It has an I5 processor, 4G of RAM, not sure about the graphics, but they seem to have an integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 chipset from what I can find out online.

About the only info I could find online specifically about running Minecraft was a YouTube video of a guy testing Minecraft on a 6410, not 6420. He was complaining about the slow frame rate and the lack of performance on that laptop, although it didn’t look bad to me, and I don’t think my son will be too discerning about the frame rate and general video quality.

So what do you think-- is Minecraft and a 6420 a pretty good match?

The website suggests trying the demo before buying, especially if you have a laptop with an a built-in (integrated) graphics card, rather than a dedicated card.

No good to you though since you don’t yet have the laptop.

https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/325948-minecraft-system-requirements

I have one, I’ll do a minecraft benchmark on it for you.

Heyo you can use this site to see if your computer can run any game you want to run, however it requires you already have the computer.
Personally I have found that integrated graphics card aren’t all that great. I have an easier time with dual graphics card, although you probably wouldn’t be interested in that.
Minecraft isn’t really super resource intensive, so you could probably play it, but it’ll be choppy and slow for your son.

We have a WAY crappier laptop than that. From before they were making processors with an ‘i’ designation. And it runs Minecraft just fine.

You should be able to do vanilla Minecraft, as my son does on a similar system. Running a modpack however, may be problematic.

I’m getting under 10 FPS just walking around, even in a window. It runs, but I wouldn’t call it playable.

Hey thanks yoyodyne! Thanks to everyone else for tHe advice too. Think I’ll change plans, either get a refurbIshed desktop and put a good graphics card in, or look for a used gaming desktop on craigslist. He has a Chromebook he can use for school and maybe next school year we’ll look for a better laptop for school.