PC Specialist Cosmos II HD review

It’s rare to see a powerful graphics card in a general-purpose laptop, but the PC Specialist Cosmos II HD manages to combine a 2GB Nvidia GeForce GT 750M chip with a highly capable Core i3 processor for just £600.

It tore through our Dirt Showdown test, producing a silky smooth average of 57.5fps on High quality at a 1,280×720 resolution. This makes it a highly capable gaming laptop for those on a budget, and it can comfortably handle games at its native 1,920×1,080 resolution as well. We managed 38.6fps on High quality at Full HD and 50.8fps on Medium graphics settings, so you should be able to play most 3D games without having to compromise too much on graphical fidelity.

This is hugely impressive for a £600 laptop, but the graphics chip may struggle with more demanding 3D games. We were only able to get a stuttering 15.4fps in Crysis 3 on Low quality at 1,920×1,080, but we managed a smoother 20.2fps on High quality at 1,280×720. This isn’t quite fast enough to play games at high-quality settings, but it’s still a lot better than most other laptops at this price can manage.

The Cosmos II HD has plenty of processing power at its disposal as well. Our review sample came with a 2.4GHz Intel Core i3-4000M processor and 8GB of RAM. The M suffix means it’s not constrained by the ultra-low energy consumption of Intel’s more common U series of processors, so it’s able to draw on a lot more power for intensive media tasks. This was shown by its hugely impressive score of 47 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, which is the same score we got from the Core i5-based Scan 3XS Graphite LH145. This makes it one of the most powerful Core i3 laptops we’ve tested in recent months, so it should have plenty of speed to tackle multiple applications at once as well as those that require multi-threading.

The keyboard isn’t best suited to typing long text documents, as we found its keys could be a little spongy at times. This caused us to miss out the occasional letter while typing, which led to more mistakes than usual. Admittedly, the keyboard gave a lot more tactile feedback than other Clevo (the manufacturer of the case) keyboards we’ve tested in the past, and our accuracy was fine as long as we remembered to hit each key firmly while typing at speed.

We liked its large touchpad as well. Its smooth surface produced just the right amount of friction when using multi-touch gestures and Windows 8 shortcuts and the dedicated buttons were another welcome addition.

The Cosmos II HD comes with plenty of ports, including two USB3 ports, two USB2 ports, one of which doubles up as an eSATA port, VGA and HDMI video outputs, a multi-format card reader, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a DVD rewriter and separate headphone and microphone jacks. Our sample also had a 1TB hard disk, which gives you lots of space for your files.

The only minor disappointment was the laptop’s 15.6in screen. Its 1,920×1,080 resolution looked razor sharp, but its overall image quality left a lot to be desired. We measured a contrast ratio of just 281:1, which is one of the lowest scores we’ve seen from a laptop, so images weren’t very detailed in our high contrast test shots. This wasn’t helped by the screen’s poor black levels. We recorded a black level reading of 1.02cd/m2, which is much higher than usual. This meant our solid blacks were practically grey in our subjective image tests, and we also noticed a very slight amount of backlight bleeding in the top corner. You’d have to strain your eyes to see it on a daily basis, though, and we certainly didn’t notice it while watching films either.

Fortunately, the laptop’s colour accuracy was much more promising, as our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 78.5 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is above average for a laptop of this price, and our reds, greens and blues all looked deep and vibrant.

The Cosmos II HD’s battery life was also good for such a power hungry laptop, as it lasted 5h and 6m in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness. Most gaming laptops only last around four hours, although playing games on the move will drain this much faster than writing Word documents, for example.

The PC Specialist Cosmos II HD has its flaws, but we’re willing to overlook them in the face of its fantastic value. You’d be hard pushed to find a quicker laptop with such a powerful graphics chip at this price, so if you want greater graphics performance than the Best Buy-winning Asus X552CL, the Cosmos II HD is for you.