Cadiva
New member
Having last bought a laptop when my son was a year old some 6 years ago, I found my trusty Dell (yes I know but it was a bargain end of line deal!) was starting to show its age and now I'm reliant on a laptop as I cannot get upstairs to my desktop PC due to a long term disability, I started looking around for a new one.
I knew of PCSpecialist due to my work moderating a couple of gaming forums and so they were one of my first port of calls to scout out a pre-built system as I was hoping to get something pretty quickly. I'd just got a backdated disability payment and I had the money to buy something outright so was hoping I'd not have to wait for a custom build.
Unfortunately all the pre-builds within my price range had Windows 8 installed and I knew I didn't want to have to get that with Win 10 on the horizon as most people I knew who'd got a W8 system had been moaning about the lack of the Start Menu Button among other things so decided it would have to be a custom build.
I wasn't sure what I wanted but knew it didn't have to be top of the range because although I would be using it for gaming, I don't play any FPS or twitch games which rely on a low frame rate so I looked a the various i5 options and in the end came down to a 15.6in Cosmos III shell with the following:
Chassis & Display Cosmos Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-4340M (2.90GHz) 3MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB KINGSTON SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 950M - 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 12
Memory - Hard Disk 500GB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Operating System Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence
why no SSD? Mostly because I couldn't afford a big one and as I play a lot of MMOs, I need a decent amount of hard drive space. So why not a 1T drive? Because in seven years of gaming on my old laptop I've still got 145G of space left on it so figured a 500G would be within budget and still give me enough space to play around with and I didn't want to lose the second drive space as I wanted a DVD player.
So I put my order in and waited and expected it to be a good 10 or so days before my laptop arrived. Well I was very pleasantly surprised to receive it within a week. I ordered it on the Thursday and had it in my hands by the following Tuesday - seriously impressive service.
It's a lovely looking piece of kit, nice and sleek and smooth and I absolutely love the fact the keyboard is big enough to have a number pad as that was missing from my old Dell laptop and as a gamer, NumLock is vital for auto running It runs quietly most of the time, the fans only kick in when it's loading up a game like Cities: Skylines which is quite CPU intensive but once it's running, things tend to quieten down a bit. It boots up really quickly and installing and transferring all my necessary files and programs across via our wireless network at home was a doddle.
Couldn't be happier with this new laptop and I've played Star Wars: The Old Republic, Banished, Cities:Skylines, The Sims 4 (I know, I know!), Skyrim, DragonAge Origins and various other similar games at a nice high graphic level without any issues. Well worth the investment.
I knew of PCSpecialist due to my work moderating a couple of gaming forums and so they were one of my first port of calls to scout out a pre-built system as I was hoping to get something pretty quickly. I'd just got a backdated disability payment and I had the money to buy something outright so was hoping I'd not have to wait for a custom build.
Unfortunately all the pre-builds within my price range had Windows 8 installed and I knew I didn't want to have to get that with Win 10 on the horizon as most people I knew who'd got a W8 system had been moaning about the lack of the Start Menu Button among other things so decided it would have to be a custom build.
I wasn't sure what I wanted but knew it didn't have to be top of the range because although I would be using it for gaming, I don't play any FPS or twitch games which rely on a low frame rate so I looked a the various i5 options and in the end came down to a 15.6in Cosmos III shell with the following:
Chassis & Display Cosmos Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-4340M (2.90GHz) 3MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB KINGSTON SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 950M - 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 12
Memory - Hard Disk 500GB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Operating System Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence
why no SSD? Mostly because I couldn't afford a big one and as I play a lot of MMOs, I need a decent amount of hard drive space. So why not a 1T drive? Because in seven years of gaming on my old laptop I've still got 145G of space left on it so figured a 500G would be within budget and still give me enough space to play around with and I didn't want to lose the second drive space as I wanted a DVD player.
So I put my order in and waited and expected it to be a good 10 or so days before my laptop arrived. Well I was very pleasantly surprised to receive it within a week. I ordered it on the Thursday and had it in my hands by the following Tuesday - seriously impressive service.
It's a lovely looking piece of kit, nice and sleek and smooth and I absolutely love the fact the keyboard is big enough to have a number pad as that was missing from my old Dell laptop and as a gamer, NumLock is vital for auto running It runs quietly most of the time, the fans only kick in when it's loading up a game like Cities: Skylines which is quite CPU intensive but once it's running, things tend to quieten down a bit. It boots up really quickly and installing and transferring all my necessary files and programs across via our wireless network at home was a doddle.
Couldn't be happier with this new laptop and I've played Star Wars: The Old Republic, Banished, Cities:Skylines, The Sims 4 (I know, I know!), Skyrim, DragonAge Origins and various other similar games at a nice high graphic level without any issues. Well worth the investment.
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