- This is the perfect Minecraft gaming PC.
And this is the one that you should actually build.
So to find out what it takes to build
the perfect Minecraft gaming PC,
I sat down with someone who happens to know a thing or two
about the game.
Saxs Persson,
who is the chief creative officer of Minecraft.
- I, I've been with Minecraft for seven years now.
Like we look at the speedruns all the time
to see where's the game hitching,
like where's the,
where people hitting sort of the limits
of what they can do in the game
and what do we need to do better?
- Can you give me a little bit of a background
on kind of like,
what some of the most important technical components are
on the PC side to really give you the max performance?
(laughs)
- My cat would like to say
anything under 60 frames a second is a crime.
(laughs)
Memory bandwidth is super important
because if you think about like one chunk of Minecraft
is 16 by 16 by 16 cubes,
so that's, what's that 4096 cubes
that are tessellated, then imagine like,
how many, how many chunks you're really seeing?
Like, because you're looking below ground too.
If you're a speedrunner,
and you're, you're by nature
only being in areas you've never been in before
we haven't tessellated,
you want that to go as fast as possible
so you can see where you're going,
But you don't want to enter like a nether portal
and look out and then wait 10 seconds
till the like sort of the view data distance fills in,
you would never, you would, you would never break it yeah,
a world record that way.
- [Austin] To get some insight on what it takes
to speedrun Minecraft at a competitive level,
I also chatted with Couriway,
someone who has multiple world records.
Obviously you're playing on PC.
Do you use keyboard, mouse?
Do you use controller?
Kinda like, can you walk me through a little bit
about the gear that you use right now.
- I don't have anything like too crazy computer-wise.
Like I have a GTX 1080,
I have some pretty standard stuff.
I have like a two terabyte external hard drive
where I just like shove my runs in.
But it definitely helps to have a better PC.
You definitely have an advantage.
The other big advantage is world loading.
Being able to reset harder with a better computer
is definitely probably the biggest hardware difference
for the game right now.
- If you were like building a set up from, from scratch,
are there any specific upgrades that you would go for?
- I would say like a GTX, like 30 whatever,
like 3070, 3080 or 3090.
32 gigs of RAM.
And then I've been looking at,
I think it was a Ryzen like 5700 processor
or something like that.
Most runners stream and record at the same time.
So having something that can handle that is,
is really really crucial.
- So to truly build the ultimate Minecraft gaming setups,
we're here at our fine sponsor, Micro Center
to get all the components we need.
So for our realistic Minecraft build,
we are going to be going with something a little unusual,
a Core I5-11400.
This actually my opinion is enough performance
to really run Minecraft at high settings.
But importantly, it also won't break the bank.
Now for our fully ultimate ridiculous setup,
we're gonna go for a Ryzen 9 5900X,
12 core super high clock speeds, overclock-able.
Between these two,
these will really be the basis of our Minecraft setups.
One of the things that's really important
for Minecraft is the RAM.
So what we're gonna be using here is not only G.Skill
but we're gonna be using for our lower end system,
16 gigs of RipJaws,
but especially when it comes to that high-end,
we really want to be able to allocate
as much memory as possible
so we're gonna go for
a full 32 gigabytes of G Skill Trident Z Neo.
Not only will this look great, but importantly,
it should allow us to allocate a ton of RAM
specifically just for Minecraft.
- You are not going to believe what I just found.
- Oh, you found one.
- Found one.
- Yes. Okay.
- Just the right color too.
- Of course, in Creeper green.
So this is the Lian Li 011 Dynamic.
Not only is just one of my favorite cases out here,
but importantly, it comes in Creeper green.
Do you know what your next trip to Micro Center could use?
A free pair of Bluetooth headphones.
All you need to do is check out the link in the description,
throw in your email address
and you will be emailed an in-store coupon
to pick up a pair of headphones, just like this for free.
So what are you waiting for?
And my voice just cracked.
'Cause I'm so excited about the deal.
You can also check out the link in the description
for the Micro Center community quest.
New prizes each week are all leading up to a grand prize
of a $750 Micro Center gift card.
The secret code for you who are still watching
is "MINECRAFTPC"
to enter to win the grand prize and more.
- [Ken] Feel like I always love getting these,
- [Austin] Ohhhhh.
- [Ken] we should totally get a Kraken-
- [Austin] Z73?
- [Ken] Z73 I believe will work.
We should double check it real quick.
But any one of these that have the screen on the CPU.
- We'll put some TnT on this.
Oh, it will be. YES.
Today's a good day.
And so it is time to begin building
our perfect Minecraft gaming PC set up.
Now there's a lot of components we have here.
But the one I really want to pay attention to is this,
this is the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 TI.
Now not only will this allow us
to run Minecraft with full ray-tracing
and a roughly 3 billion chunk distance render.
Okay maybe not 3 billion, but a lot.
So this is a Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master.
We've used this in the past and honestly
this is one of my favorite motherboards right now.
Don't let the B550 branding fool you.
While yes it's not technically X570,
this still has almost all of those same features.
And importantly it's a little bit more of a modern chip set,
which means that we will still be able to easily drive
a Ryzen 9 5900X,
as well as our,
32 gigs of Trident Z Neo memory.
Now on the other side,
we have our reasonable Minecraft gaming PC.
I feel like this is the one
that you are probably more likely to build.
So not only do we have our Core i5-11400,
but importantly,
we also have all the things that we really need.
So we have a 1650 Super,
it's not a super powerful graphics card,
but it does have enough power and importantly,
it does have NVENC, on-board,
which is going to make streaming much easier.
Speaking of streaming, we also have,
in addition to our 500 Gig Crucial SSD,
we also have a one terabyte external.
Now all of this is going to be
not only using the Gigabyte H510M,
but we're also going to be putting it
inside an NZXT H510 case.
Hit markers.
You know, 2015 memes.
I think there's really nothing else for it.
Let's get to building and see exactly
how our perfect and reasonable Minecraft gaming PCs
could come together.
So this, as you might expect, it's coming along nicely.
So thankfully everything actually is
fairly well color-matched.
And by that, I mean, it's all black on black, on black.
So we've got black sleeves for our power supply,
the newer style Intel stock cooler, which is also black.
The black board.
Even our SSD is black.
So now it's time to see what color our 1650 Super is.
I'm gonna guess it's black.
Oh look it's black.
With Minecraft. this seems like a solid card.
Four gigs of VRAM should be fine.
While it might not be the latest,
most cutting edge RTX card,
if you can find one of these at retail
at your friendly local Micro Center,
you're still getting a good amount of performance.
That's clean although,
certainly not a aesthetically impressive system.
It's really just black on black.
We don't have any LEDs.
We didn't get any like LED fans or strips or anything.
And that's almost entirely because this system
is not really about the aesthetic.
This system is about giving you a good gaming
and streaming sort of setup for Minecraft.
That system is about the overkill.
How is that system looking?
- [Ken] It's going great.
- Why don't we walk over here and take a look.
So you've got the push-pull setup.
So you've got these stock NZXT fans on the back
and you've got the LLs up front.
- [Ken] Yep.
- Dude, this looks really nice.
I love the finish that Lian Li put on this.
The green,
and on top of that, the red sleeves,
it's a nice little pop of color,
especially cause you've got a little bit of red
here on the board as well.
I'm really happy with how both these systems are coming out.
I think we're in store for some of the best
Minecraft action you've ever seen.
Ken when was the last time you played Minecraft?
- [Ken] A month ago?
- That's pretty impressive actually.
I haven't played in a little while.
- [Ken] Okay.
- A little while.
A long long time.
So this is what our reasonable Minecraft set up looks like.
Now it might not be the coolest looking setup,
but importantly, it gets the job done.
I'm actually really happy with how it's come out.
So of course we have ourselves, the dual displays.
So both of them are running at 1080p 75 Hertz.
One of the big differences between
the last time you've seen it
And that it's actually up and running
is the fact that we've now
incorporated a camera involved.
Not a webcam, oh no.
This is an EpoCam,
AKA, it's an app for iPhone that via USB
lets it turn into a webcam.
Now, if you would like you can certainly use
any kind of webcam if you've already got one.
But for me, considering I already have an iPhone,
it's easy enough to get actually pretty decent quality.
So in fact, if I actually want to hop in here,
you can see that while it's certainly not perfect,
especially with like fast motion
it doesn't look super super crisp,
but it's actually a very, very usable setup.
I can easily just hop over into the game
and I can get everything like that.
So we do have a Kraken X headset which um,
you can now hear what it sounds like.
It's not amazing,
but considering this is like a $50 headset,
it's pretty solid.
We also do have the Naga mouse,
which specifically has a ton of macro keys.
Now just one note,
you're looking at 1080p footage through OBS.
If you're streaming,
you're probably going to want to stream at 720p instead.
But I just want to show what the system can actually do.
Now one of the important things I want to show
is how fast it is to actually create a new world.
Especially if you're speedrunning,
you may go through this tons and tons of times every day.
So we'll call this test 2. Create.
Now it's certainly not a "fast thing"
if you don't have plenty of CPU, plenty of GPU.
And one of the things I have done is
I've allocated eight gigs of RAM to Minecraft,
which is probably more than we really need.
As you can see, we've created a new world pretty quickly.
If I pop up F3 here,
you'll see that while I've got a,
I believe the 22 chunk distance render distance right now,
it's actually running pretty smooth.
So right now it's like 115, 120 FPS.
I've seen a dip as low as about 60-65.
But considering we're streaming at 60p,
it doesn't really bother me too much.
So clearly this is just a brand new world
and I will certainly not try to speedrun it
and try to figure out and how to get to the,
what is it, the, the nether?
I should probably know this.
I've actually never beaten Minecraft before.
I've never even made it to the Nether.
(laughs)
I've never even made it to the Nether.
(laughs)
So it's one thing to play the game
and see the settings
and have OBS running,
but it's a very different thing for me
to speedrun Minecraft myself.
So I have never tried to speedrun Minecraft in my life.
So I'm gonna cheat by starting out with a set seed.
Ready? And let's begin.
All right so we're immediately here.
Where am I going? Where am I going?
- [Matt] You gotta kill the Ender Dragon.
- [Austin] I need to, yes,
I don't see an Ender Dragon.
There's nothing around me anywhere.
Wait, I think I see a village. I think I see a village.
A bed. I want a bed.
Yep.
Need that for the Ender Dragon.
I Like your hat bro.
Wait can I do anything with you?
- [Ken] Dude stop wasting time.
- [Austin] Okay well where am I supposed to go?
- [Ken] Around.
- [Austin] All right. I'm ready,
to do something.
- [Matt] Well as of me saying this right now,
you've just lost the ability to be
the number one ranked speedrunner.
- People are already done?
I haven't gotten anywhere.
Get over here.
- [Ken] He's gonna die before.
He's just going to die.
Oh no that's not.
I don't like that.
- [Austin] How's he so strong?
- [Ken] You're not using a sword that's why.
- [Austin] I don't have anything.
- [Ken] That's, that's unfortunate.
- [Matt] Okay, so your time was 8:35.
That's third place.
- Third place?
- Except they beat the game instead of dying.
(laughs)
- Okay. We're going to start again in 3, 2, 1
generating world.
- [Ken] If you win, in 10 minutes,
I'll give you this whole entire thing.
- I'm not going to win it.
What? That would be like almost world record pace.
Okay. Hang on.
So I found a village.
Okay so I'm gonna loot it as fast as I can. Okay.
- [Matt] You really chose that one and not the oak?
- I don't care what kind of wood it is Matt.
I've got to win at all costs.
Okay all right all right.
So I have a shovel.
I'm just gonna start digging.
- [Ken] You're literally making yourself a staircase
that you don't need to make.
- [Austin] Well, how am I supposed to get out of here huh?
(exclaims)
- [Ken] A cave.
- [Austin] I found stuff.
I hear something laughing at me though
that's probably a bad thing, right?
- [Ken] Oh, you're in ohh.
(yelling)
No. There's a chest to chest.
- [Austin] WHERE?
- [Ken] Oh, that's a-
(yelling)
Hit him, hit him with the sword.
Sword. Sword.
Be careful of the, the, oh, there's a-
(Austin yelling)
- [Austin] What the-
- [Ken] Oh no, he's got a witch nevermind.
(Austin yelling)
- NO.
NO.
How could this happen?
(grunts)
- [Matt] 6:16
- [Ken] So you died quicker.
- [Matt] You did better that time.
- I got a lot farther that time.
Did you see my movement?
My movement was on point.
Okay, so at this point,
we've clearly seen my expert speedrunning skills,
but what we haven't seen
is what the perfect Minecraft system is capable of.
This is a little bit more like it.
Welcome to the perfect Minecraft setup.
So of course the system is inside of an 011 Dynamic,
specifically in Creeper green.
As you can see,
the color scheme is very much leaning into that.
One of my personal favorite parts of this system
is the fact that we are using the NZXT,
the Z73 cooler,
which means it's not only
a 360 millimeter radiator,
but importantly, it looks great with the screen.
We have a total of 9
LL120s
which let's just say this back panel is gonna stay on.
Cable management is impeccable. Don't worry.
But outside of the system itself,
all the performance and all the aesthetic,
we also have a good group of peripherals as well.
So not only do we have ourselves headset, keyboard, mouse,
but also, we have ourselves a fairly large
32 inch LG Ultra Gear display.
This is running at 1440p at 165 frames per second.
Have you noticed this particular version of Minecraft
looks a little different
because while the reasonable gaming PC
is capable of playing at 1080p,
decent chunk distance,
you can stream and whatnot,
this is not about trying to get your world record,
this is about turning up RTX to the maximum
and see what Minecraft can really do
when you throw a 3080 TI at it
and a 12-core Ryzen processor
and 32 gigs of RAM
and a bunch of LL120s.
So if you've never played Minecraft with RTX on,
it is a big difference.
You can see a light like this is accurately portrayed
the way it should in the game.
I think I'm gonna restart
and show it at daytime though.
I think it looks better in daytime,
especially with the reflections on the water.
So not only does RTX sort of change,
not really so much the overall feel of the game,
but really the look of it, right?
So you've got very realistic ray-tracing that's everywhere.
Even something as small as this little light right here
or all the way over to say,
if I walk over to the water,
you can see that there's this huge difference
to the sort of feel of the game.
Like even from here,
you can see there's accurate reflections.
And in fact, right now, if I hop into video,
right now we've got it set to 16 chunks of render distance.
And I mean, it is incredibly smooth
on this 165 Hertz display.
The smoothness of this gameplay
is not something you're gonna be able
to see in the video, right?
Like we're not uploading this video at 160 FPS.
But look at how natural this one little torch
is lighting the room but watch, if i knock it out,
ah that's cool.
- So we just saw Austin play
RTX Minecraft on Minecraft for Windows,
but I personally like playing on the Java edition
as do a lot of other people.
In fact, probably most people.
And while
1.17 exists,
we're gonna be playing on a prior version to that,
1.16.5 because we have some of my favorite shaders
and texture packs there.
Which while isn't technically Minecraft RTX,
it does have some ray-tracing on it
specifically on the Seus shaders that I'm using,
which I think look absolutely brilliant.
And I think we'll tax this 3080 TI.
And here we are.
So I'm loaded into this newly generated world,
as you can see, I literally have nothing.
I also have my own little skin here.
I have a Kentama skin.
- [Matt] Of course you do.
- [Ken] Friend of mine made this.
A lot of things set to fancy, maximum.
On my shaders I have some anti-aliasing off apparently,
we'll leave that off
'cause we're currently at 50 frames
and honestly, with Minecraft,
I don't think you'll really need anti-aliasing.
Most importantly guys, like, look at this water.
- [Austin] Oh my God.
- [Ken] This water looks great doesn't it?
- [Austin] Wow.
- [Ken] See the fish through there and all that.
Look at the sun.
And as we move around,
you can see that the lighting kind of shifts
depending on where we are.
The shadows look really nice too.
Look at all of the lighting fall off
through these trees here as well.
Oh man, look, look at how the sun
peaks over the building over here.
Oh my God. That's almost searing my eyes.
That's actually really bright.
- So big thank you to both Saxs as well as Couriway
for all their insight in helping us build these gaming PCs.
And if you're interested in any of the components
that we have here,
you'll find them at the links in the description.
Thanks to our very kind sponsor, Micro Center.
Now the real question is,
what game should we build a perfect gaming PC for next?
It's gotta be Valorant right?