Fantastic i5 Cosmos III set up from PCSpecialist.

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 :D 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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Hi Cadiva,

I'm looking at getting a new laptop myself, do you reckon the i5 in your cosmos is up to playing the games of today and others in the next 5-6 years?
 

keynes

Multiverse Poster
Hi Cadiva,

I'm looking at getting a new laptop myself, do you reckon the i5 in your cosmos is up to playing the games of today and others in the next 5-6 years?

have you look at benchmarks online? for demanding games you need to lower the settings and resolution of games. I really doubt it can keep up with games for 5 years.
 
have you look at benchmarks online? for demanding games you need to lower the settings and resolution of games. I really doubt it can keep up with games for 5 years.

I've looked at loads of benchmarks, I know the disadvantages of the i5 over the more expensive i7 model, which I can't afford if I want a laptop with a GTX 960. Keep in mind, I don't play highly taxing blockbuster games like Witcher. I just want to know if its a good sustainable CPU for moderate level gaming. You really think it will struggle with game development in the next 5 years?
 

keynes

Multiverse Poster
I've looked at loads of benchmarks, I know the disadvantages of the i5 over the more expensive i7 model, which I can't afford if I want a laptop with a GTX 960. Keep in mind, I don't play highly taxing blockbuster games like Witcher. I just want to know if its a good sustainable CPU for moderate level gaming. You really think it will struggle with game development in the next 5 years?

I was referring to the gpu, sorry I misread the question. An i5 should be fine , how long it will last? don't think anyone can really answer that. For gaming the gpu is likely to need replacement before the cpu
 

Cadiva

New member
Hiya Amir, I don't think the GPU will stand the test of time for five years at top settings no but the CPU will probably be fine, this is powerful enough for all the games I'm playing atm and I don't think processing power is going to alter that much in the next five years not in the same way as GPU requirements do.

It's working great with the kind of games I'm playing atm on high settings but I don't do any first person shooter gaming so I don't need to have a brilliant FPS rating or low latency. It's coping really well on high graphic settings for Star Wars: The Old Republic, for games like Dragon Age, Pillars of Eternity, RPGs, RTS games and strategy games like Cities: Skylines etc though.
 
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