Laptop advice

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone could give me advice for a laptop, my currently laptop is about 9 years old and has given more trouble than it's worth over the years, so anything new would be a nice change. I'll mainly be looking for laptop for programming with a bit of gaming from time to time. I was looking at the 17.3" COSMOS VII with increasing the memory to 500G ( or even 1 TB). If anyone could give advice I'd appreciative it.

Thank you

Some of the specs, I was thinking off (dropped the 500GB/1TB Idea)

Chassis & DisplayCosmos Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD IPS 60Hz 72% NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080)

Processor (CPU)Intel® Core™ i7 Six Core Processor 8750H (2.2GHz, 4.1GHz Turbo)

Memory (RAM)8GB Corsair 2133MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 8GB)

Graphics CardNVIDIA® GeForce® MX150 - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12

1st Hard Disk240GB ADATA SU650 2.5" SSD, SATA 6 Gb (520MB/R, 450MB/W)

Memory Card ReaderIntegrated 6 in 1 Card Reader (SD /Mini SD/ SDHC / SDXC / MMC / RSMMC)

AC Adaptor1 x 120W AC Adaptor

BatteryCosmos VII Series 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery

Power Cable1 x 1 Metre Cloverleaf UK Power Cable

Thermal PasteSTANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING

Sound Card2 Channel High Def. Audio + SoundBlaster™ Cinema 3

Bluetooth & WirelessGIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® AC-9260 M.2 (1.73Gbps, 802.11AC) +BT 5.0

Hello EmmaB and welcome to the fora.

It would help to know what games you'll want to play, even if you only play occasionally. Some of or other members who are more gaming experienced that I will let you know how good that spec will be for the games you want to play.

For programming and general work that spec is perfectly fine. The CPU is a bit overkill for programming and general work, but probably needed for gaming.

Whilst an SSD will speed up your laptop experience are you sure that 240GB is big enough? Although a 500GB or 1TB 7200rpm HDD will not be as fast as the SSD it will be plenty fast enough for your programming and general work, and I suspect for gaming too. It's a trade-off between speed and capacity of course and only you can make that call.

Graphics CardNVIDIA® GeForce® MX150 - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12

Click to expand...

This is an extremely weak graphics card.

I expect your gaming needs are relatively modest going by the age of your last laptop. However, the MX150 will be insufficient to play many titles from the last 3-4 years at 1080p even on the lowest settings at anywhere near a playable framerate.

The 8750H is probably overkill for your work needs, and is wasted for gaming purposes because the graphics card will be an overwhelming bottleneck.

The Cosmos only comes with the option of a GTX 1050 graphics card as the alternative to the MX150, rather than the 1050 ti. The 1050 ti is greatly preferable for laptops where there is a choice as the cost difference of the GPU itself is usually about ~£50 (where it's available in the same chassis) and it's ~35% more powerful.

The point isn't just to get more GPU power now, but that because you cannot upgrade the GPU in a laptop when you need more performance for future games the only way to get that is to buy a whole new laptop. Therefore it's usually best to aim for the 1050 ti in order to put off buying a new machine for as long as possible.

Either way, avoid the MX150. What's the point on dropping £800 on a laptop if the GPU was pretty well obsolete a few years ago for gaming.

If 15.6" is viable then I would suggest this: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/configure-review/268/
It's a review spec which means you can't customise it, but it comes with a fixed, discounted price. Packing the i7 8750H, a GTX 1050 ti, 1x8gb RAM, and a 256gb SSD for a fixed £800 price.

If it must be 17.3" then drop the CPU to the i5 8300H, which is still very powerful for a laptop CPU, and up the GPU to the GTX 1050. Though despite the larger screen it does pack much weaker hardware than the review spec Vyper - though probably still sufficient for your needs.

For the SSD, the SU650 is very basic. Although the quoted speeds look competitive with the other models, it's not going to deliver the same kind of performance as a WD Blue or an 860 Evo.

Also, it's a 2.5" SSD, rather than an M.2 SSD. The laptop has 2 slots for storage, 1 x 2.5" bay, and 1 x M.2 slot. The M.2 slot can take SSDs including some very fast NVMe SSDs. The 2.5" bay can take 2.5" (Sata) SSDs or 2.5" HDDs. It could therefore make sense to get an M.2 SSD - this leaves the 2.5" bay free for either another 2.5" SSD in the future, or a cheap 1TB HDD if you need mass storage.

The best value-end option would be the 256gb SX6000 M.2 SSD, which is unfortunately out of stock (ETA 15 July apparently).

So:
- That Vyper spec is a much, much better deal if 15.6" is okay
- If going with the Cosmos, then:
--- swap the CPU to the i5 8300H and the GPU to the GTX 1050
--- Get an M.2 SSD - and if it needs to be relatively cheap then either the SX6000 if you can wait, or the WD Blue if you can't

Thanks for your replies guys

Gaming wise, definitely once is awhile (maybe more with the right laptop and once college work is over) but just for games like Dragonball xenoverse 2, assassin's creed and Friday the 13th games.

Screen size isn't an issue, just thought having a big screen would be better for coding. Would you recommend viable for programming? I was hoping to install a dual both of linux and windows if that would affect the specs in any way.

15.6" is probably the most common laptop screen size so should be fine for work uses.

If you're going to be using the laptop a lot in the same place e.g. your office / study etc, you can always buy an external monitor for it. You can get 24" 1080p monitors for ~£80 on sale fairly often.

Friday 13th and any reasonably modern Assassin's Creed title would certainly benefit from having a 1050 ti.

*Edit: And the hardware would be fine for dual booking Linux and Windows. Linux isn't officially supported on PCS systems, but the components that make them up are pretty generic and so it should be fine. The worst people report is things like keyboard RGB lighting not cooperating on Linux, although recently people have posted extensive guides on how to get even this kind of thing working on Clevo chassis.

Thank you for your help, I've order Vyper

Glad it helped Let us know how it goes, if you have the time once you get the system and test it out.