Medion Erazer X40 Beast review: it’s an animal

Introduction

Strange as it may sound, this monster of a gaming laptop represents excellent value. The Medion Erazer X40 Beast uses top-tier components like Intel’s latest Core i9 silicon and Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics, plus it’s genuinely well built – yet costs a reasonable amount less than a mid-tier rival from Asus. You could pay thousands more from the likes of Razer or Alienware.

We’ll be honest up front, it’s not the perfect gaming laptop. Fans of RGB lighting may find the design too reserved. The speakers kinda suck. And while the display is great for competitive gamers, certain aspects of the image quality are only acceptable. Still, if you think value matters even when spending the kind of cash that’d also get you a small second hand car, it’s a winner.

Review originally published on 4 January 2023

Design: A sensible style

The Erazer X40 Beast throws out a lot of gaming laptop norms like ostentatious heating vents, obnoxious patterns on the lid and as many strips of RGB lights as can reasonably be crammed in. What’s left is a good fit for folks who find the adolescent vibe of gaming laptops a bit embarrassing. There’s just a colour LED behind the logo on the lid, and a small LED strip on the back.

The moody all-black style might be compared to Razer’s Blade 17 series. It’s tasteful, but unlike Razer, the Medion isn’t out to be crowned “the Apple of gaming laptops”. It’s moderately bulky and not the kind of laptop you’d want to use as an ultraportable.

That’s not to say the build is basic. It’s rather good. The lid and underside are aluminium, the inside’s finish is a soft-touch plastic. Medion also arranges the numerous connections on the left, right and back, making neat cable management an actual possibility. On the right we two two USB-A ports and a full-size SD slot. The left is home to an additional, faster 10Gbps USB-A and separated mic/headphone 3.5mm jack slots. Around the back there are HDMI 2.1, Ethernet and Thunderbolt 4 ports. Why stick that last one around the rear? Medion thinks you may want to hook up a dock through this connector, which makes a lot of sense.

You’ll also find two weird little round connector things on the back, used to interface with Medion’s water cooling system. That’s right, water cooling is an option here. We haven’t tested the €200 kit, which isn’t readily available outside a few European countries.

There’s also a 1080p webcam up front, matching that of most ultraportable PCs. But its image quality it not great, turning splotchy and undersaturated in lesser lighting. It does have a secondary IR camera though, enabling a good face unlock feature despite the mediocre (for a Full HD webcam) picture quality.

We have one issue with the Medion Erazer X40 Beast design: the meaty power cable at the back falls out with the slightest provocation. However, we’ve probably moved this laptop around more than most will.

Screen: Speedy, if not cinematic

The Erazer X40 Beast’s 17.3in screen is all about the refresh rate. It’s a 240Hz IPS LCD, designed to provide better-looking motion, and to properly display the incredibly high frame rates you’d expect from a gaming rig this pricey. G Sync support is included too; Nvidia’s proprietary take on VRR (variable refresh rate) does a great job of eliminating screen tearing.

It sensibly uses a reflection-busting matt plastic finish, which is what more performance-focused gamers will want – but compared to the recent slew of OLED laptops, a few areas get slightly neglected in favour of smooth movement.

The rather limited colour gamut fulfils the entire sRGB spectrum, so doesn’t look remotely undersaturated, but 72.5% of the DCI P3 colour space is a way off what we see from today’s top-performing screens. Contrast could also be better. We measured a ratio of between 850:1 to 900:1, which is low enough to potentially become an issue if you play in a dark room, where the raised black floor is going to be more obvious. Still, the 2560 x 1600 resolution is good, and the 411-nit peak brightness provides solid headroom for a gaming laptop.

The screen isn’t paired with an especially potent set of speakers. There’s no real bass, and the width of the sound is not impressive. Voices sound boxy and coarse, so just can’t do justice to games or movies. This is quite normal for a gaming laptop, though. A svelte MacBook Air will typically wipe the floor with most 3kg gaming models. Better to put on a gaming headset instead.

Keyboard and touchpad: Clacking great

You might expect the Erazer X40 Beast’s power to be what wowed us the most, but we were super impressed by the quality user experience. That’s down to the keyboard — often nailed by gaming laptops — and the touchpad — often borderline ignored in gaming laptops.

Medion has gone with Cherry MX mechanical keys, which pays off wonderfully. This thing feels fantastic. The keys are extremely fast, while providing great action, clear feedback, low finger stress and a flat-out high quality feel all-round. This is the one area that gets the RGB treatment too, with a full colour backlight and fine grain control over the intensity level and colour. We love it for typing just as much as gaming.

That said, it’s super loud. Anyone nearby might found the high-pitch clicks it emits furiously annoying. This is the norm for the mechanical keyboards you’d buy for a desktop gaming PC, but most of us aren’t hardwired to expect a laptop to generate such a click-clack racket. You’ve been warned.

The Erazer X40 Beast’s touchpad is just great, by gaming laptop standards, in less contentious fashion. It’s a large panel of glass with a luxury ultraportable style clicker feel. Standards for gaming laptop touchpads have come on significantly in the last couple of years, and it’s great to see Medion out there with the vanguard even if it is still concerned with “value”.

Performance: Best of the best?

The clue’s in the name, really: the Erazer X40 Beast was designed to be a no-compromise laptop, and so duly delivers on high end hardware. You get the pinnacle of Nvidia’s mobile graphics options, the RTX 4090, which has 16GB of dedicated video memory. The Intel Core i9-13900HX has a whopping 24 CPU cores, and you also get 32GB of RAM plus 2TB of SSD storage. While the HP Omen 17 provides such specs for similar money, you’re looking at 30% more to get a Razer Blade 18 specced to this level.

It is, as advertised, a beast, with the RTX 4090 able to draw up to 175W of power. Of course, a desktop RTX 4090 can draw up to 450W, so don’t buy one of these expecting parity with a desktop PC. It’s closer to the performance of a last-gen card. In 3DMark’s Time Spy test it scores 20448 points, much closer to the score of a desktop RTX 3090 than a desktop RTX 4090. This is expected, and is just something you have to make peace when with buying a gaming laptop versus a desktop.

We tried the laptop with what might be the most demanding challenge available at the time of review, Cyberpunk 2077’s Overdrive mode. This features super-advanced ray traced lighting and is a no-go lesser cards. While the Medion Erazer X40 Beast won’t generally reach above 60fps at native resolution with everything maxed, that all changes with the flick of the Nvidia frame generation switch. This keeps frame rates above 60fps at all times, in our testing, and frequently sees the laptop hit above 120fps. It’s glorious stuff.

After a good chunk of play we saw the GPU moving between 165-170W power draw. Seeing the top claimed 175W figure is a real rarity, but does happen.

The Erazer X40 Beast gives you super-simple control over the performance of the system. Right by the power button there’s a second button that cycles between Silent, Balanced and Gaming presets. In Office, the Beast is virtually silent when you go about doing basic stuff like writing documents. This seems to more-or-less kill the GPU, as Cyberpunk 2077 dove right down to 5fps on switching mid-play.

Even when maxed the fan speed is polite, and has the character of a stable “whoosh” of air, rather than that of an airplane taking off. There is a slight higher-pitch element to the fan tone, though, which is one of our few disappointments with the Median Erazer X40 Beast. A bit of treble whistle makes these fans less easy to ignore.

Battery life: Big cell, bigger demands

Medion has packed the largest battery it can in the Erasser X40 Beast: a a 99Wh cell. Get any more capacious and you’d be banned from flying with it. However, even this super-high capacity does not stack up that well when dealing with these kinds of components.

After four run-down tests, doing nothing more than streaming video off YouTube, the best we saw was four hours 34 minutes. This is after disabling the direct GPU connection, enabled as standard, and manually selecting the integrated Intel graphics chipset in the Nvidia control panel. You have to put effort in just to get to 4.5 hours. Perhaps this isn’t all that surprising when the Median Erazer X40 Beast’s CPU alone has base power of 55W.

The power adapter is also big and heavy, but is a serious brick, capable of delivering up to 330W. It can also charge the laptop at up to 115W. That’s around double the maximum of the average slim and light laptop.

Medion Erazer X40 Beast verdict

Medion has managed an unlikely feat with the Erazer X40 Beast, making such an expensive laptop seem like good value. This is about as little as you can hope to pay at the time of review for a laptop with an Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card, 13th Gen Core i9 processor and 32GB RAM. The fanciest models charge hundreds and hundreds more for the same specs. And yet Medion still manages to fit in some top drawer design features like a cracking Cherry MX mechanical keyboard and large glass touchpad.

Where do you feel the cuts? The integrated speakers are not good, and we’ve seen much better 1080p webcams this year. We do wish the fan tone had managed to avoid the higher-pitch element to the tone heard. There’s some “whee” with the “whoosh”, but it doesn’t take too much shine off this laptop. Not persuaded? Check out the HP Omen 17, one of the few competing models at a similar price.

Medion Erazer X40 Beast technical specifications

Screen	17.3in, 2560×1600 LCD w/ 240Hz
CPU	Intel Core i9 13900HX 24-core
Memory	32GB RAM
GPU	Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090
Storage	2TB NVMe SSD
Operating system	Windows 11
Connectivity	3x USB-A, 1x USB-C/Thunderbolt 4, HDMI, Ethernet, SD card reader, 3.5mm in/out Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
Battery	99Wh, up to five hours
Dimensions	383x272x36mm/15.1×10.7×1.4in 2.82kg/6.22lb