Verdict
The combination of an aggressive price and eminent - end components attain the Medion Erazer Beast X40 a brilliant note value large - CRT screen gaming laptop computer .
Pros
Cons
Key Features
Introduction
The Medion brand can now and then be observe at Aldi , the rebate UK supermarket , and it prove . Don’t let that dissuade you , though . The Lenovo - have brand name does have some telling machine in its card , and the newfangled Erazer Beast X40 is one of the very best .
A pureblooded next - generation gambling laptop , the X40 features the latest and greatest components from Nvidia and Intel . The presentation does n’t have a clever multi - zoneMini LEDbacklight soHDRperformance is nonexistent but that ’s the only drawback .
Despite the tip - top spec , Medion has n’t forsaken its value - for - money pitch . At just under £ 3,500 ( or £ 3,000 for the RTX 4080 simulation ) , it ’s well inexpensive than the 18 - in machines coming from makers like Asus ROG and Razer .
Design and Keyboard
I would n’t describe the X40 as a visually illustrative gaming laptop . Like its X25 and X30 forebears , it ’s a sober matt black affair and made all from alloy . It ’s a whole old lump in terms of the main body but there is a peck of flex in the slender lid . At 2.6 kg , it ’s on the light side for a 17 - inch gamer and at 383 x 36 x 272 mm it ’s not overly magnanimous either and 3 mm of that depth is learn up by the real galosh foot the X40 pose on .
Medion has resisted go down the hardcore gamer route . The only giveaways that this is n’t a workstation are the two RGB light slip that sit above the rear outlet on either side . I ’m a firm buff of this less - is - more style in stake laptop design , so the X40 really speaks to me as a solid , practical and unostentatious bit of product design .
You will find a wide option of port scattered along both sides and the tail end of the big Medion . The list runs to four USB embrasure ; two eccentric - A 3.2 Gen 1 , one Type - A 3.2 Gen 2 and oneThunderbolt 4 , a 2.5GbEEthernetport and anHDMI 2.1video yield . There are also two 3.5 mm sound jacks , one combo , one mic - in , and , rather remarkably , an Mount Rushmore State card slot .
The DC - in power jack , RJ-45 connexion and HDMI output are all usefully out of the way at the rear along with the two cooling pipe ( about which more below ) but that ’s also where Medion has awkwardly exiled the Type - C port wine . Wireless duty are address by the ubiquitous Intel AX211 card which brings 6GHzWi - Fi 6Eand Bluetooth 5.1 to the company .
The keyboard is a mechanical social function made up of Cherry MX low - visibility keys and very nice it is too , with a precise and positive activeness and a wholly upstanding base . The Florida key themselves have a good amount of travelling – about 1.7 mm I ’d approximate – and a exonerated audible and tactile propulsion compass point .
There ’s nothing strange or odd about the layout , so no half - height or half - width key to touch off you up and of course , you get a per - central RGB light show . For both gaming and typing , the X40 ’s keyboard is excellent . If I was being principal investigator to be picky I ’d mention the absence of shortcut keys to toggle between performance modes or open up the primary gaming control condition instrument panel .
The only small downside , and it ’s one innate to mechanical keyboard , is that the activity is a little on the noisy side . This really is not a laptop to take into a library unless you want everyone else in the place frown at you and “ shushing ” you .
At 150 x 100 mm , the touchpad is huge . It ’s smooth and responsive with a absolutely calibrated click action . There are small white LEDs in each upper nook of the pad : tapping the left one disables the touchpad , while tap the right turns only the ripe half of the inking pad off . It ’s a handy feature but the corners could do with being more reactive to a tap .
Getting inside the X40 is very straightforward and once the base plate is off , you have easy access code to bothSSDmounts , the two SODIMMRAMslots , the wireless card , the bombardment ( which is roll in the hay rather than glue in place ) and the buff . The designers could n’t have made it any easier to clean , supercede or kick upstairs the internals if they had tried .
Gaming laptops be given to come with bespoke control panels to oversee the various spunky features like the carrying out orGPUmodes , expose colour profile and light display . The customisation software fitted to the X40 ( again , lifted from TongFang ) is a masterpiece of clarity and chasteness that let you easily see what you’re able to monkey with and then do the fiddling . It constitute the comparable computer software from Asus ( Armoury Crate ) and MSI ( MSI Centre ) count overly complex and clunky .
Medion make no power claims for the two loudspeakers buried inside the X40 but they certainly farm a seemly amount of volume with a consistent 77.5dB measure at a 1 m space . There ’s not a whole draw of sea bass in grounds though and the phone is more than a picayune on the coarse side , something that fiddle with the Nahimic control panel ca n’t sterilise . For gaming , they do the chore but for anything else , you ’ll really need earpiece or remote speakers .
Most gaming laptop have scummy 720p webcams and no biometrics but the X40 has a half - comme il faut 1080p camera and support for Windows Hell IR facial acknowledgement both of which came as a pleasant surprise .
Screen
Rather than follow the likes of Asus ROG and Razer , who are fitting their latest large - screen machines with 18 inch displays , Medion has choose for a data format in the center . Coming in between the one-time 16:9 17.3 - inch and the raw 16:10 18 - in type with a 17 - in 16:10 panel and a WQXGA or 2,560 x 1,600 , resolution . It ’s a great compromise that results in a spacious , but not overly large , screen with a usefully high ( 177.5dpi ) pixel compactness and an look ratio optimise for gaming and working rather than watching widescreen movies .
It ’s a technically competent sieve , displaying 99.3 % of the sRGB gamut along with 70.3 % AdobeRGB and 73.2 % DCI - P3 . maximal brightness registered at a healthy 417cd / m2 though sinister luminescence was on the high-pitched side at 0.44cd / m² which resulted in a mediocre line ratio of 954:1 . look at those number it ’s readable that the X40 ’s covert wo n’t do Justice Department to HDR content and indeed it does n’t but that ’s the trade - off in the price being considerably low than the Mini light-emitting diode competition .
One thing to note about the exhibit is that there are no received color profiles in the control panel . you could switch between Vibrant , Video , Internet , Low Blue , Cinema and Photo but you will search in vain for an sRGB clamp or DCI - P3 profile . you’re able to easily adjust all the key coloring setting but you ca n’t preserve them to a user profile . Comparing the sRGB profile to the Photo circumstance generated a Delta E colour variability of just 1.27 , which is fantabulous , and means the X40 can be used for colour - critical employment out of the box .
The display is fully compatible with Nvidia ’s G - Sync technology , so you wo n’t experience any tearing during gameplay , and it handles move well with only a hint of ghosting visible in the classical UFO examination .
The X40 is fitted with a multiplexer or MUX permutation , that stops the integrated Intel Iris XE integrated graphics from stupefy in between the GPU and the display . This benefits both frame rate and epitome character . You get Nvidia ’s Advanced Optimus system which removes the need to reboot the organization to swap between GPU preferences . Just as long as you could live with the few second freeze , that is a feature of sophisticated Optimus switching between intercrossed and discrete GPU modes .
Performance
A brief glance at the specification sheet will give you a good idea of the X40 ’s potentiality , with a 175W Nvidia RTX4090 GPU , an Intel Raptor Lake i9 - 13900HX processor ( with 16 efficiency core running at up to 3.9GHz and 8 performance sum run at up to 5.4GHz and 32 coinciding threads ) and 32 GB of quadruplet - channel DDR5 RAM . Make no mistake , the X40 is a seriously degenerate gambling trailer truck .
At native screen result and maximum detail , maximal irradiation - tracing and no DLSS upscaling , the X40 chalked up 63fps in Metro : Exodus , 93fps in Cyberpunk 2077 , 143fps in Horizon Zero Dawn and 122fps in Borderlands 3 . Those are excellent results for a laptop computer no matter what the Leontyne Price . Even at the high video recording detail place setting , a less demanding eSports title like Apex Legends ran at an comfortable 220Hz .
With DLSS set to Balanced , the Metro : Exodus result jumped to 105fps . act a plot that supportsNvidia ’s latest DLSS 3 upscaling technologyand you ’ll see even good consequence : Forza Horizon 5 – which has recently had DLSS 3 support added – with all the detail horizontal surface rick up as high as they would go delivered 115fps without DLSS but 176fps with DLSS and Frame Generation engage . That ’s an impressive 50 % increase .
celluloid benchmarks tell a similar fib , with the Beast ranking right up amongst the high - scoring laptops that have queer my path lately . The 3D Mark Time Spy score of 19,032 and the PCMark10 result of 8,754 were both up with theMSI Titan GT77 HXwhich is a ogre of a laptop computer with a cooling system of rules that can wake the dead and a price tatter of over £ 5,000 .
The Cinebench R23 mark of 28,130 could n’t quite equate theAsus ROG Scar Strix 16 ’s 30,867 – both laptops running in Turbo mode – but the remainder is bordering on negligible and irrelevant .
The X40 is amazingly , even remarkably , still when black market under a heavy load . Of naturally , you could hear the buff spin and the hot air being pushed out of the outlet but at no point does the sound become overly intrusive as it does with some other high - end gambling laptops I could mention .
If you want to get even more performance from your Beast then Medion will trade you a water cool too . It connects magnetically to the two pipes at the rump of the simple machine , with the laptop and the tank sharing data via Bluetooth . UK availableness is sketchy so you ’ll probably need to bribe verbatim fromMedion ’s German site . It ’s credibly good to adopt that the Cooling Kit will also reduce fan activity but since the Beast is quite a still performer that ’s not a grounds alone to splash out .
The two PCIe 4 x 4 SSD drive in the X40 are of Phison make and their execution is solid but nothing more , returning sequential read speeds of just over 7GB / sec and compose speeds of just below 5GB / sec . Incidentally , one of the driving serves as the system get while the other is used for data memory rather than the two being tie together in a RAID array .
Battery Life
The 99.8Wh battery inside the X40 is the large capacity unit you could fit inside a laptop computer and still touch US Federal Aviation Administration safety rule .
A full charge enabled it to reach the 5 hours and 37 - minute target in PC Mark ’s Modern Office battery benchmark and 1 hour 18 in the Gaming test . Those are pretty seemly act count this eccentric of laptop is n’t really designed to be used in a serious way of life when away from a power socket and compares well enough with the like of the Asus ROG Scar Strix 16 and MSI Titan .
Latest deals
Should you buy it?
The Medion Erazer Beast X40 is much cheaper than the MSI Titan and just as powerful . The Asus ROG Scar Strix 16 costs £ 200 less but it ’s got a diminished display and a weaker GPU .
There ’s an absence seizure of the HDR performance that you ’ll get from a good OLED or Mini - LED IPS show . Single - zone IPS panels just ca n’t compete .
Final Thoughts
I really had to struggle to find fault with the Erazer X40 Beast . The presentation is good , it ’s massively muscular , has an first-class mechanical keyboard and some nice ancillary touches like biometric log - in and an optional urine cooler . And all for a pretty reasonable price .
Unless HDR carrying into action is a must – that ’s the only reason I ’ve bob the X40 a half - star – you ca n’t really go wrong . If you do want that Mini LED showing goodness , theAcer Predator Helios 16 ( 2023)is your best bet if you do n’t desire the monetary value to skyrocket . For a taste of the good living , see towards theAsus ROG Strix Scar 16 ( 2023 ) .
Trusted Score
How we test
Every gaming laptop computer we review goes through a serial of uniform checks designed to gauge primal thing including form quality , performance , projection screen quality and battery living .
These admit formal synthetic benchmarks and written tryout , plus a series of real - world check , such as how well it runs when running a AAA game .
FAQs
Medion is a German brand but it has been a wholly - possess subsidiary of Lenovo since 2011 and Lenovo is one of the most well-thought-of laptop computer manufacturers in the human beings . Medion ’s repute in Britain for only making cheap laptops is a picayune unfair because the UK by and large only get the lower - price model rather than the premium machines it sells on the continent .
With more and more games being designed to take full advantage of HDR playback , that ’s a good question . On a big reminder good HDR capableness is undoubtedly deserving hold but on a modest laptop show ? I ’m not so sure . Mini LED laptop displays are indeed impressive but you bear quite a premium for them . Personally , I think the X40 ’s display is more than right enough for a laptop .
Test Data
Full Specs
