My son is turning 9 and has been using his computer more and more. he has my old System76 wild dog from 2010, which is a great computer, but is way past the end of its life. He mostly plays minecraft and browser games, though he is doing more artistic stuff in gimp and even a bit of cad for our 3d printer or in blockbench.

We’re looking at a System76 Meerkat for him. For most things I think it would be a huge upgrade, but it is NOT a gaming computer. That being said, his requirements are slim. He mostly plays Switch or on the tablet for “gaming” and I think if it ever came down to it, we could explore things like external GPU’s. He’s not even on steam yet.

The Meerkat can use Intel UHD graphics, or Iris Xe graphics depending on the CPU. I would like some subjective feedback on if those are workable for a kid’s computer, the specs are here (we’d probably go 12th gen CPU): https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat#specs

  • qwesx@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Does it have to be a mini-PC like that? If you can put together a PC (or know someone who’ll do it for free/cheap) you can get a significantly better midi-tower PC for less money.

    Edit: And if you’re going for the high-end version of the Meerkat then you have over $400 to blow for the service of putting it together and you still end up with a more powerful self-built machine. Which is also more extensible in case your son wants to put in a dedicated entry-level graphics card later on. Midi-Tower PC, CPU comparison, GPU comparison

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Could cut that price down even more picking up some used parts locally, but thats quickly putting time into the equation, and money might be more well spent by Op getting something complete in a box vs time spent on all this.

  • sambeastie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I have an XPS 13 with the i7 1165G7 and Xe graphics are fine for light stuff like Minecraft (even with shaders) or indie titles from the last 10 years. He won’t be able to push very high framerates or resolutions, but at 1080p with low/medium graphics, it should be workable.

    • surfrock66@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yea, he has a 1080P monitor and we use sodium; he gets entity lag at times and if he uses the Bobby mod to render a 64-chunk radius his client crashes, but I think he won’t notice. In general, it’ll be a huge improvement.

  • ComeHereOrIHookYou@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I had a chance to use UHD 630 for mild Linux gaming for a couple of months 5 years ago. So far it was good. Was able to Minecraft (No shaders though) with decent fps and a couple of 3d browser games such as Forward Assault (Some Counter strike like game), Tetr.io and Bemuse.

    For Steam games… it was able to play 2d games great. Majority of newly released 3d games (Indie, triple A is out of the question) that time, the iGPU struggleds however.

    Well I only wanted to play Skyrim at 1080p and it was able to deliver.

    Also was able to play Dota and Counter Strike Global Offensive too.

    I don’t think the newer intel iGPUs are any better, I mean it can play 3d games fine but usually performs OK on games a generation behind or older.

  • d3ceived@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m having a good time even on an 11th gen mobile Intel processor with its iGPU. For more demanding games I use FSR to get much more bang for buck from the iGPU, on Linux it’s pretty easy to activate in almost any game. On a side note, Waydroid (with libhoudini) also has excellent performance on this setup.

  • surfrock66@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    /u/@qwesx@kbin.social I can’t reply to comments from kbin.social, so here is the reply

    I couldn’t reply yesterday for some reason, but we are gonna do a mini prebuilt for 3 reasons, 1) the space caters to it more, he’s at a small area of my desk in my home office. 2) He’s not interested in building a computer yet. We just rebuilt the minecraft server and he was totally disinterested, and it’s desktop parts in a server chassis, he just wants to use it. I think that’ll change when he’s a little older, but for now this is a better fit. 3) Warranty; I have used system76 machines for years for work and the warranty is worth it for a really reliable machine.

    We will make his own computer for sure one day…I don’t know how to explain this, but hopefully this shows how much I get it, this is me custom designing my own acrylic lan party case in 2001: https://www.surfrock66.com/compucube-case-design/ and here’s it’s successor in 2004: https://www.surfrock66.com/the-supercomputer-mod/ I’ve been doing super-customs for a LOOOOONG time, and one day he will for sure enter the world lol.