A look at the beast
Midland has undertaken a little bit of tweaking on the noise front. Our review of the chassis found to be louder than the price-comparable competition. The sample, though, could be termed as fairly quiet even when under full load.
An oversight by many, we feel, no card-reader is installed on the front. Its provision would only take up the one slot on the front, and the Cosmos S has plenty of room.
The combo Blu-ray/HD DVD drive (GGW-H20L) is handy, being able to write at 6x to BD discs and backed up by supporting software.
Water-cooling inlets are unused as the Corsair Hydro H50 is an all-in-one unit. The rear is fairly standard, with the PSU at the bottom, graphics card in the middle, and I/O ports higher up. The Gigabyte EX58-UD5 does support eSATA by way of an expansion bracket, but Midland hasn't installed it here.
Rather, eSATA is connected up to one port on the top of the chassis.
A peek inside shows a tidy build inside the cavernous chassis. Seeing as expandability is very much the name of the game, we had hoped to see cable pre-plumbing for an additional GPU and hard drives. The sleeving of power cables is inconsistent, too, as some have a wrap whilst others don't.
The Corsair H50 does a good job in keeping the CPU overclocked by over 1GHz. We see this as very much a gamer-oriented system; the graphics card would have benefitted from some pre-overclocking; it ships at the default speed, as noted earlier.
Software and machine setup
Midland set the board's BIOS up to enable users to regain the shipping settings by loading up a profile, which makes good sense. The BIOS, however, wasn't optimal, as the AHCI support function's disabled, fan failure and temperature warnings disabled, along with the USB keyboard and mouse options.
On loading up the operating system, we noticed that both the built-in Windows and BullGuard firewalls were active. This, in our experience, can lead to unnecessary complications which can be weeded out by switching one off.
Another dual-operation problem we identified was with the way the audio was configured. As shipped, both the onboard Realtek audio and discrete Creative SoundBlaster Titanium card were enabled, yet the lower-quality source was active.