Switching battery on Cosmos

Hi everyone - new PCS customer here. Looking at a laptop which will mostly be used for 'coffee shop' remote office style working. I might occasionally use it for light gaming/netflix etc. Decision comes down to Ultra 15" vs Cosmos 15". I like the better battery life of the Ultra but investing in the better graphics of the Cosmos might make that a better longer term option.

My question is how easy is it to switch battery on these PCS laptops (Specifically Cosmos). Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere - I couldn't find a similar question on the forum or the main website

thanks

Proposed Cosmos Quote:

Chassis & Display
Cosmos Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i5 Quad Core Processor 7300HQ (2.5GHz, 3.5GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM)
8GB Corsair 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® MX150 - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12
1st Hard Disk
250GB WD Blue™ 3D NAND 2.5" SSD, (upto 550MB/sR | 525MB/sW)
Memory Card Reader
Integrated 6 in 1 Card Reader (SD /Mini SD/ SDHC / SDXC / MMC / RSMMC)
AC Adaptor
1 x 90W AC Adaptor
Battery
Cosmos VI Series 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre Cloverleaf UK Power Cable
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card
Intel 2 Channel High Def. Audio + SoundBlaster™ Cinema 3
Bluetooth & Wireless
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® AC-8265 M.2 (867Mbps, 802.11AC) +BT 4.0
USB Options
1 x USB 3.0 PORT (Type C) + 2 x USB 3.0 PORTS + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Keyboard Language
SINGLE COLOUR BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD
Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Windows Recovery Media
NO RECOVERY MEDIA REQUIRED
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Notebook Mouse
INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE
Webcam
INTEGRATED 1MP HD WEBCAM

I don't know for certain but typically the batteries in the laptops are all removable and swappable if you have a spare. If there's not a sufficiently detailed picture on the Cosmos page you could always ask PCS directly should no one be able to answer on here

How do you define light gaming?

Light gaming typically means turn based strategy games like Civilisation. Googling some comparison sites the Ultra 15 with its Intel 620 graphics is probably fine for that - but looking longer term the Cosmos with its MX 150 is a clear step up - but at the cost of higher power usage which I probably don't need and might leave me cursing the battery life if I can't easily get to a power socket in a coffee shop. I'm in my early fifties and "grew up" with laptops from the likes of Dell, Sony which were trivial to swap the battery. By comparison swapping batteries on something like a modern day macbook is definitely not trivial. Just hoping someone on here can give me a clue. Is it say a simple two minute job removing no more than one or two screws or is it a major - "Don't do this except if the battery fails" type job. I can't see from the pictures how this is done.

I posted a question about running Civilisation on laptops on a discord server I belong to - one comment suggested that with a USB-C port I could always attach an external GPU in the future if I really wanted to use the laptop for gaming. To be honest that pushes me back towards the simpler and more efficient Ultra machine

OK - I think I might have answered my own question - I found a 'Unboxing a Cosmos V laptop' on youtube https://youtu.be/WhdumBfGdqM?t=3m24s which clearly indicates that for the Cosmos V the battery change is indeed trivial - the battery even comes separately packed.

Assuming Cosmos VI hasn't fundamentally changed the chassis from Cosmos V then I'm good.

The Cosmos's MX150 will not do well with Civ 6. If considering an eGPU as an option it would frankly make more sense to get an Optimus VIII with its GTX 1050 ti, which will do well at Civ 6 (still not enough to max it out mind you) and be a lot cheaper than buying an extra GPU and the enclosure to go with it. Not to mention being more portable.

Thanks Oussebon - I spec'd up an Optimus but when comparing with the Ultra and Cosmos everything ruled it out as over powered for my day to day needs. If the machine was being bought with a lot of gaming in mind I would completely agree but gaming is very much an after thought - I do 99% of my gaming on a suitable spec desktop at home. Even if I did end up occasionally running Civ 6 on an under specified laptop, it's straight forward enough to turn off things like leader/unit/wonder animations etc.

I've seen what happens when you try to run Civ 6 on underpowered systems from my own experience. The results aren't good at all. Given that you can't replace a laptop GPU I do recommend going over rather than under your needs.

It's your call, but at least you've had fair warning of what to expect so can make a decision with realistic expectations

Another significant factor in things like Civ is the number of opponents, size of map and most importantly how far into the game you are. Playing say the first 200 turns on a smaller map with say six civs will perform much better than say the final stages of a huge map with twelve no matter what the hardware.

In the end I decided that the potential for gaming was leading me to 'mission creep' for this laptop. It's just not important enough. I've gone back to my original home-office requirements and have ordered an Ultra. Once everything is up and running I'll install the Steam client and try a handful of different games as an experiment. My prediction is that they will install and run absolutely fine - provided I don't get ambitious.

Thanks for the discussion - you've helped me focus on what I really want for this laptop.

Yeah, and there's the AI turn processing qhich is quite different to the framerate. I have to run Civ 5 on super low settings and still struggle to get 60fps on integrated graphics on turn 1. But the turn processing time is fine as it's a 4C/8T CPU.