Cosmos vs Optimus IV!

L

Lightspeed

New member
Hi all,

I'm a university student so I need a laptop but I'm also a bit of a gamer. I do play a lot of modern games but generally less graphically intensive ones such as League of Legends and Diablo. On the flip side, I'd like the option to be able to run Skyrim or Battlefield at a reasonable frame-rate (preferably 45+, medium or low-ish settings do not bother me) if I want to.

I've decided I don't really like the look of the Optimus IV aesthetically. It looks clunky and cheap in the pictures. I much prefer the neater, more lightweight Cosmos 15.6". Unfortunately the 660M graphics card is unavailable for this laptop, so I need to take the 740M which is apparently around 10% less powerful. It is also cheaper - meaning I can just stretch my budget to get a better CPU than if I was to go for the Optimus. Is this a decent trade-off? Does the better CPU make up for the weaker GPU?

Also, if anyone has either laptop PLEASE leave me feedback on how you feel about the build quality and appearance. I am definitely substance over style but both are important to me. Info about battery life would be great too. I'd like to be able to browse/do uni work for at least 3 hours on battery.

Cosmos Specs:

i7-3740M CPU @ 2.7GHz
8GB 1333MHz RAM
GT 740M

Total Price: £745

Optimus Specs:

i7-3630M CPU @ 2.4GHz
8GB 1333MHz RAM
GTX 660M

Total Price: £724

Thanks for reading!
 
R

rav007

Enthusiast
Lightspeed said:
Hi all,

I'm a university student so I need a laptop but I'm also a bit of a gamer. I do play a lot of modern games but generally less graphically intensive ones such as League of Legends and Diablo. On the flip side, I'd like the option to be able to run Skyrim or Battlefield at a reasonable frame-rate (preferably 45+, medium or low-ish settings do not bother me) if I want to.

I've decided I don't really like the look of the Optimus IV aesthetically. It looks clunky and cheap in the pictures. I much prefer the neater, more lightweight Cosmos 15.6". Unfortunately the 660M graphics card is unavailable for this laptop, so I need to take the 740M which is apparently around 10% less powerful. It is also cheaper - meaning I can just stretch my budget to get a better CPU than if I was to go for the Optimus. Is this a decent trade-off? Does the better CPU make up for the weaker GPU?

Also, if anyone has either laptop PLEASE leave me feedback on how you feel about the build quality and appearance. I am definitely substance over style but both are important to me. Info about battery life would be great too. I'd like to be able to browse/do uni work for at least 3 hours on battery.

Cosmos Specs:

i7-3740M CPU @ 2.7GHz
8GB 1333MHz RAM
GT 740M

Total Price: £745

Optimus Specs:

i7-3630M CPU @ 2.4GHz
8GB 1333MHz RAM
GTX 660M

Total Price: £724

Thanks for reading!
Click to expand...

Not sure how relevant this reply will be 10 days on but here goes anyway
Are you looking to buy the OS with these too? I don't know the full specs you have chosen for both but it looks like you are willing to spend a good 20 quid more for the cosmos, if this is the case I would look into the optimus V because it was about 30 quid more than the optimus iv last I checked and the 765m is a "step up to true pc gaming" according to nvidia, you will play skyrim in high to ultra, BF3 in high: http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-765M.92907.0.html Note the settings on notebookcheck though as the resolutions for high and ultra settings differ. The optimus v does have a fan issue though, but about 90% of people have found one resolution or another and PCS are working on an official one with clevo, I thought it was best you know that - there is a thread on this forum about the fan issue.

As the grand master above said, cpu won't make up for a weaker gpu and I would add in about 95-98% of instances. Some games are very cpu dependent though, but an entry level i7 quad core should not give you a problem running such games. If you do not know, the main difference between the two is how they are used, a CPU is a few cores with very high frequency, and a gpu is a very high number of cores with a relatively lower frequency. The former is great for single stream processes such as a long sequence calculations in series. The latter is great for a many calculations in parallel, so the architecture is massively different and so if you have a lot of things going on on a screen to put it in the most basic terms, having a hypothetical 300 core GPU can tell you what 300 army men in in a game are doing in parallel really easily but a cpu can only handle a handful at a time, and although it does that handful faster, it cannot compete with the massive volume the GPU can do.

In terms of the 2 cards here is another discrepancy that I noticed, the 740m is advertised with DDR5 (DDR5 and GDDR5 are used interchangeably, they mean the same thing, DDR3 and GDDR3 are different or were when I last checked. GDDR3 = DDR3 VRAM. DDR3 is also the name for system ram used by CPU and some GPU's are able to share some of this). Officially nvidia have a DDR3 and GDDR5 version of the card released, but I would absolutely check with PCS first, because firstly all the laptops from competitors that I have seen which have the 740m have DDR3 VRAM and GDDR5 outperforms both GDDR3 and DDR3 ram on a GPU by some margin, and the GTX 660m confirmed has GDDR5 ram so if the 740m has DDR3 VRAM and not GDDR5 it will be outperformed. It already ranks lower on Notebookcheck: http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-740M.89900.0.html.
 
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