Board Thread:LotR Mod Technical Support/@comment-29740540-20170305193441/@comment-27219153-20170305215135

I built my own PC last summer and targeted for the same price. It ended up being a little under $1600 with all peripherals.

So it basically depends on what you want your PC to do. First off, I'd like to ask you if you'd even consider building your own computer. I didn't have any experience building PCs and I was able to do mine without problems, so its probably not as difficult as you might think. The main reasons to build your own computer are: If you think you may be interested in building your own, I can provide more in-depth requirements of all your components and link you to some good tutorials.
 * Get exactly the specs you want.
 * Usually save money if you were to buy the same system from a retailer such as Best Buy.

CPU
Minecraft runs primarily on a single core of your CPU. When you see things like 6-core, 8-core, or 10-core, they don't really matter to minecraft because it only uses one. I would not go above 4 cores unless you plan to do some serious multitasking, video editing etc. Minecraft performance heavily depends on clock speed, so if you want higher frames per second, you're going to need a higher clock speed. Before I built my PC, I had a laptop with a processor that ran at ~3.1Ghz, which gave me about 100-150 fps in Vanilla minecraft. Now I have a ~4Ghz processor (6700K, the same one thats in the best buy pc you linked) and I get 700-1000 fps in Vanilla (Usually ~300 fps in LOTR). Of course if you have a lot of entities, these numbers will drastically decrease, but this should give you an idea of what clock speed you might want to get the fps you want.

RAM
I think 16 GB is a really nice sweet spot for gaming. It gives you enough that you don't have to worry about running out, but also allows you to give it a little extra when you need it. Sam did a good job of explaining this.

Storage
I went with a 512 GB SSD, and there is a huge difference between a HDD and a SSD. If you need a lot of storage, I would suggest a lower capacity SSD to boot from and run your most used games off of; then, get a HDD for storing the large files that you don't use that often, but still want to keep.

Graphics Card
If the only (intensive) game you play is minecraft, then you don't really need to worry about the specs of your graphics card too much because minecraft is primarily dependent upon the CPU. I would just get something released in the last 1 or 2 years and look up some reviews on youtube just to make sure its decent. You'll probably want something like a GTX960, 970, 1060, or 1070 (from Nvidia) or RX470, 480 or 390 (from AMD).

''Note: I just realized you said you only are going to use it to play minecraft. I'll leave it as is, just in case other people look at this and want to see what they might need if they want to play other games too.''