Construction
Le Medion Erazer Beast X40 est PC portable gaming which takes up the codes of gaming, with in particular a backlit logo on its plastic shell and two transparent inserts located at the level of the vents and lit by RGB LEDs. The entire chassis is made of plastic and picks up fingerprints easily.
The design of this notebook does not belong to Medion. This is a model offered by several brands around the world and customized for Medion. It is thus possible to find across the Rhine an identical model sold by XMG or even across the Atlantic by CyberPowerPC.
Plastics tend to retain fingerprints. © The Digital
The opening of the 17.3-inch screen reveals a mechanical keyboard equipped with MX Cherry switches backlit in RGB. Note that the numeric keypad and function keys are equipped with membrane switches that contrast with the responsiveness of the rest of the keyboard.
The touchpad is huge, even too much. © The Digital
The touchpad is huge. Medion also offers two options for taming it. Double-clicking the top left of the tile deactivates it, while double-clicking the top right deactivates only the right half of the surface. In terms of use, the glide is pleasant, but often gives the impression of getting lost on this large surface. Small flat for the right click which is often badly taken into account; you really have to press the lower right corner to validate the requested action.
Close-up of the water cooling connection sold as an option. © The Digital
The connectors are distributed on the sides and the back of the Erazer Beast X40. Thus, on the left side, there is a USB3.0 port and headphone / microphone sockets; at the back, an HDMI port, a Thunderbolt4 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port and the port for the watercooling kit. Two USB3.0 ports and an SD card reader complete the connectors on the right of the chassis.
For the wireless part, Medion uses the Intel AX211 chip which allows the Beast X40 to be connected to Wi-Fi 6E at 2400 Mb/s and Bluetooth 5.3. The onboard webcam is of poor quality; its 720p sensor does not perform miracles and the rendering is really bad.
Close-up on air extractions. © The Digital
The cooling of the Erazer Beast X40 is substantial in order to cool the ardor of the Core i9 and the GeForce RTX 4090. No less than 6 heat pipes are responsible for transferring the calories released to the four radiators distributed in the angles under the screen. Two fans vent all of that out of the chassis.
Under the thermal camera, the temperature is around 45°C at the keyboard. It even reaches 46.4°C at the level of the piano. The heating is concentrated mainly in the center of the keyboard; the ZQSD keys and the arrow keys located not far from the fans remain cool.
The temperatures are rather contained given the on-board configuration. © The Digital
Medion offers 3 ventilation modes. The first (“Office”) is the equivalent of a silent mode; the second (“Balance”) is the equivalent of the “balanced” mode; the last mode (“Turbo”) speaks for itself. A button located just next to the start button allows you to switch between modes without going through the control software.
The “Office” mode does not allow you to play, the performances being drastically restricted. The frequencies of the processor then yo-yo and make it possible to maintain a relatively low sound level (37.9 dB measured). The “Balance” mode lets the fans express themselves (44.1 dB). Finally, the Turbo mode completely frees up the frequencies and the noise pollution rises to 45.9 dB; a substantial sound volume, but far from the noisiest models, which often exceed 52 dB. Thus, depending on the operating modes, the Medion Erazer Beast X40 delivers respectively 105 fps, 115 fps, and 119 fps in the game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in 2560 x 1600. Despite a framerate that seems high in “Office” mode, the game is unplayable due to sudden drops in fluidity, sometimes falling to 4 fps.
The cooling system is impressive. © The Digital
To access the components, you have to remove 12 screws under the hull and 2 other screws around the connection for the watercooling. The hull then unclips quite easily.
Inside, the components are accessible and easily removable, except of course the processor and the graphics card which are welded to the motherboard.
The repairability index is also announced at 9.1/10 by Medion.
Performances
The Erazer Beast X40 on loan from Medion is powered by an Intel Core i9-13900HX processor, the “smallest” Core i9-HX. It has no less than 24 cores for 32 threads and can reach 5.4 GHz. It is accompanied by 32 GB of DDR5, a GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile (175 W) and two 1 TB NVMe SSDs.
Processor performance index (the bigger the better). © The Digital
Thus equipped, the Medion Erazer Beast X40 obtains a performance index of 248 with its Core i9-13900HX. At the same time, it allows itself to make fun of the Core i9-13980HX of the Razer Blade 16 which obtained an index of 245. This is explained by the more substantial cooling system on the Erazer. For the moment, the Intel Core 13 HX series processors are without competition and we will have to wait for AMD’s response with its Ryzen 7040 to hope to see a little competition.
In use, the Core i9-13900HX of the Erazer Beast X40 sees its P-cores running at 3.56 GHz on average and 3.03 GHz for its E-cores during our video encoding.
SSDs flirt with 7 GB/s in reading and 5 GB/s in writing; enough to quickly move games or video rushes. Windows will be more than comfortable with such speeds.
Jeux
As a reminder, the Beast X40’s Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile GPU is identical to the desktop RTX 4080, but with a reduced power envelope in order to fit into a laptop PC. Thus, on the Medion, the envelope is fixed at 150 W, with an additional 25 W of Dynamic Boost; for comparison, the desktop version has a 320 watt envelope.
GPU performance index (bigger is better). © The Digital
The in-game performance rating of the Medion Erazer Beast X40 is 389, which is 7% higher than that of the Razer Blade 16 with the same graphics card. Again, this difference is explained by a more efficient cooling system. If we compare to the MSI GE76 Raider and its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (175 W), the performance gain is around 53%, while the performance is almost doubled compared to the Corsair Voyager a1600 and its Radeon RX6800M from AMD.
Here is in detail the framerate obtained in our panel of games with all the details at maximum in Full HD (1920 x 1080):
Full HD frames per second (bigger is better). © The Digital
Except Cyberpunk 2077, all the games tested in rasterization exceed 150 fps, and sometimes even 200 fps. Enabling raytracing has a huge impact on framerate, with a performance loss of around 40%. However, all of the games are still largely playable. The activation of DLSS makes it possible to find performances close to those obtained in rasterization, while the Frame Generation option of DLSS3 in Cyberpunk 2077 propels the framerate to 156 fps with raytracing activated.
The Medion Erazer Beast X40 being equipped with a panel displaying 2560 x 1600 at 240 Hz, we also tested our panel of games in this definition in order to check if it was still possible to play.
Frame rate in 2560 x 1600 (bigger is better). © The Digital
Even at 2560 x 1600, the GeForce RTX 4090 allows you to play all the games on our panel smoothly. Thus, even by activating raytraced rendering and without using DLSS, it is possible to play at more than 60 fps. Small exceptions for The Medium et Cyberpunk 2077 who need DLSS to get back above 60 fps.
Mobility / Autonomy
The Erazer Beast X40 is a big baby at 38.3cm wide, 3.6cm thick, and weighing 2.8kg. The 330W charger adds 1.17kg on the scale. The set fits easily into a backpack.
The 330 W charger is impressive. © Digital.
On the autonomy side, the Erazer Beast X40 lasted 4 h 25 min on our usual test protocol (Netflix under Chrome with screen set to 200 cd / m²). A performance similar to that of its competitors, in particular the Blade 16 which has a very similar configuration.
Autonomy (the bigger the better). © The Digital
Points forts
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Monstrous performance.
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Controlled cooling.
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Keyboard with mechanical switches.
Weak points
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Mediocre webcam.
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Poor quality plastics.
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Disappointing speakers.
Conclusion
How does grading work?
The Medion Erazer Beast X40 ticks all the boxes. Its performance is top-notch, and its cooling is on par with its components. It’s a bit more capable than one of its main competitors, Razer’s Blade 16, but makes some concessions on the screen. No concession on the price, however, which remains stratospheric, like that of all laptops equipped with RTX 4090 Mobile.