Final thoughts
Building a quality PC is more than merely throwing big-name components together and hoping they'll mesh well. Midland Premier - a system-builder from Telford - has chosen a number of decent components and integrated them into a Cooler Master Cosmos S chassis. Sensibly including a D0-stepping Core i7 920 CPU and overclocking it to 3.8GHz with excellent stability, our only performance concern is that the graphics card, a GeForce GTX 295, has plenty of overclocking scope that remains untapped.There's decent futureproofing with the way the system has been specified, although upgrading could be helped by pre-plumbing various cables. We made a number of observations on how the system was setup, and a little more care and attention in this field certainly wouldn't go amiss.
The £1,995 price of the base unit is around 15 per cent higher than buying at retail, excluding building, overclocking and warranty, and, from a value point of view, we can appreciate that margin.
Generally good in most respects and requiring a minor polish in a few areas, a question we ask ourselves is the Midland Premier Cobra mkIII different enough from the glut of other high-end SIs who produce £2,000 base units? The answer, on the evidence of what we've seen, is that Midland Premier is good enough to compete but not outstanding enough to warrant immediate recommendation.
Bottom line: a well-configured, high-end gaming PC that provides reasonable value for folk who don't want to build a quality system themselves.
HEXUS Rating
We consider any product score above '50%' as a safe buy. The higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy. Simple, straightforward buying advice.
The rating is given in relation to the category the component competes in, therefore the PC is evaluated with respect to our 'extreme components' criteria.
Midland Premier Cobra mkIII
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Midland Premier Cobra mkIII can be purchased for £1,995 here
HEXUS Right2Reply
Philip Brown, technical sales manager for Midland Premier, submitted an HEXUS Right2Reply. We quote it verbatim.
Firstly I would like to take the opportunity to thank HEXUS.net and the team for taking the time and expensive to review our system. We appreciate all feedback we have received within the review and take it a constructive criticism where applicable.
Firstly to specifically address a couple of points that the review team has made....
“AHCI support function's disabled”... AHCI is a technology that allows things like Hot-Plugging and NCQ (Native Commands Queuing). These technologies however are not necessary and are proven to give sluggish system performance when turned on in a system with an SSD (especially in our case where it is our primary boot drive). NCQ which is another technology of AHCI is a good piece of technology however it does not offer any benefits to an SSD due to it only optimising the completion of read and write commands to a spinning hard drive to reduce the mechanical work load, which is not applicable to a Solid State Drive.
“No card-reader is installed on the front”... We agree, this was an silly oversight and our future system will include a internal card reader installed for no additional cost.
I would like to also add that although HEXUS has not mentioned it the system comes with a full system manual comprising of a 21 Page System Manual with a full break down of the system specification, benchmark result, test procedure and engineers testing report. We feel this is a welcome addition and we hope it gives the customer a better out of the box feel, rather than not knowing a lot about the system.
We feel it is also necessary to point out we are one of the few manufacturers that quantify our system benchmark results as way of allowing our customers to rate the systems performance prior to buying, rather than it been a subjective “out of thin air” figure. We feel this allows the customer to make a informative decision and allows them to compare the speed against similar systems.
Support is a big part of our service when buying a PC that HEXUS has been unable to comment on due to it not been necessary for review purposes. However I would like to assure our potential customers that each system purchased is backed up with free telephone support with the option of fully qualified engineers and remote support included within the cost should it be required. Very few companies are able to offer this but rest assured we can! We are not an SI nor are we new to the industry with 10 years trading experience under our belt, customer support is at the forefront of our business, whether it be Pre-Sales or Post-Sales we’ve got it covered.
