COSMIC ENTITY
NOW THAT’S ALL OVER, how was building in the Cosmos’s successor? Pretty sweet. It’s one of the few cases that you can strip down almost completely to its bare bones. There was very little left of it on our usual skeleton run, and it made building in the colossus far easier than we first thought. The ATX standoffs requiring pre-installation did catch us a little off-guard—after all, who in their right mind would plop an ITX motherboard in a full tower? But that aside, we had very little trouble with it.
One thing we would add is that it’s quite tricky to tinker with after you’ve built it. Removing those front side PSU and hard drive bay covers makes system installation easy, but trying to sort things out after they were reinstalled was a bit of a nightmare. In short, we couldn’t quite identify how that RGB fan controller was powered at first, deducing it to be some sort of sorcery and internal headered USB magic. It was only under further inspection, once the system was complete, that we noticed the not-so-obvious SATA power located at the bottom of the fan controller. At which point, we immediately threw an additional SATA power cable into the PSU, which was frustrating to say the least. Still, we finally got it plugged in, with those LED strips firing away in a stunning shade of purple. It’s a shame that you guys don’t get to see the fun we have at the photo studio. Most of the final shots (especially with LEDs) are comprised of two images: one that’s well lit, and an LED shot taken in pitch black. The two shots are then skillfully stitched together so everything is lit to the degree that our eyes typically see. In complete darkness, those light bars really do shine, and it’s beautiful.
Light bars aside, performance was a given. But it would be—the Core i7-8700K pumping away at this rig’s heart is a masterfully crafted single-core killing machine. Multiply that by 12, and you’re looking at some very tasty rendering performance. There’s little that this system can’t do, especially in game. There are a few things we’d like to tweak, though, to make that price point more bearable. For instance, a bigger PSU and a braided cable kit would be stellar. Couple that with some additional off-the-shelf cooling and internal lighting, and it would really round out the build. Also, some method of reducing that GPU sag would be good. All in all, our Cosmos was a joy to build in, and stood up to its predecessor’s legacy. Whether it will also stand the test of time, though, we’ll have to wait and see.