Gaming Laptop Brand Erazer latest Medion Erazer X7849 gaming laptop is technically portable: At 17 inches diagonally, it would be considered a desktop replacement.
Packing an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of memory, a 480GB SSD, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics chip and a 17.3-inch IPS 1080p enabled G-Sync display, this Erazer is not about to steal A desktop-grade gaming experience just to cut down a bit.
This is a system more than capable of driving any of the latest AAA titles at 60 frames per second (fps) to 1080p, in a very detailed detail with little concern. Couple that with Nvidia's G-Sync technology, and see how the screen tearing and drop frame become a thing of the past.
Price, availability and value
But with a sale price of £1,699 (about $2,199, AU $2,937), is the Erazer worth plunking down that much for a recent date processor and an apparent lack of yarn storage? That is a lot of money, regardless of how you look, especially for the spec sheet of this laptop resellers, compared to much less desktop competition laptops.
Do not they believe us? From this writing, for £ 1,706 you can get a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU, Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD, 1TB Seagate HDD, 32GB HyperX DDR4 memory, Gigabyte GTX 1070 and 27 inch, BenQ 1440p IPS display - with a solid set Of peripherals - for almost exactly the same amount of cash.
It is a system with four times more computing power, three times more storage, twice as much memory, running on a screen 10 inches larger and with twice the resolution.
Ultimately, you are paying for that portability. For that same money or less, you could have an HP Omen 17, packed with one of the latest Intel Core i7 (Kaby Lake) processors, as well as a 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD. Likewise, you can get a custom-built Source EON17-X laptop for a few hundred plus dollars with the latest hardware.
And, honestly, we do not see a great portability game here with Erazer. It's big, it's bulky and it's too much for the car on a trip. What does it leave you? A system they essentially still leave in one place from day to day.
In terms of availability, Medion serves both the US and Canada. And the United Kingdom, as well as most of western Europe.
Design of Erazer gaming laptop
That said, Erazer is really a beauty. Although LED lighting, located around the trackpad and the back of the screen, may be less attractive to those looking for a more elegant, more professional device, the smooth touch finish that envelops the rest of the system is simply stunning.
And, while it's certainly not the most portable of notebooks, the sharp angles placed around the design keep it stylish. The bezel is a bit chunkier than we would like it to be, and the standard membrane keyboard leaves a lot to be desired (especially for the price), but there is a lot to be said for it.
What impressed, however, was the cooling system. Certainly due in part to its large size, but it was rare for us to hear the fans from the ramp, if at all.
That being said, as you would expect, fans are a little whiney when they launch, but they are nothing that a good pair of headphones can not drown. Although frankly, you should not have to, most of the time you'll be buried in a good game, so it's not something that we hang onto too much with how rare it happens.
The I / O, on the other hand - oh boy, what a compliment. With the Erazer, you could effectively run three additional displays attached to this monster.
Abundant memory, missing storage
Storage, however, is one area in which the Erazer really comes unglued. In short, you get a single SSD of 480 GB. Fill that with your operating system programs, and you will be left with less than 280GB for games, not ideal. Given that the Erazer is approaching the £ 1,700 mark, and given its gigantic dimensions, we have to ask ourselves: why is there no additional hard drive?
Fortunately, the situation with regard to memory is much happier. With two of the four DIMMs available with two RAM modules of 8GB DDR4 RAM, which means that it could launch another 16GB in good measure, giving it a total of 32GB, which is useful for multimedia rendering tasks.
However, in that scenario, a serious external HDD, or a dedicated NAS, would be almost a necessity.
Performance and gaming laptop comparison
The computational performance was slightly lower than we expected, with an average of 700 below the CineBench R15 multi-threading performance, as expected from the Skylake mobile processor buried in the heart of this beastie.
That last point is a bit tight for us. At this time, Skylake is looking positively old in the world of advancing processors. Although Lake Kaby was launched in early 2017, moving parts have been available since before December.
In addition to that, Kaby Lake X, Intel's next generation processor, is supposed to be just around the corner, which means that soon we will be able to see a lot of new moving parts hit the mainstream. Couple that with AMD promising Ryzen moving parts in the next quarter, and the ageing Skylake core seems positively decrepit.
Does that mean that the Core i7-6700HQ is a chump change at this point? Yes and no. It's still a serious contender, even in its mobile form factor, which equals roughly the same processing power as any desktop-sharp Core i5-6600K. If you are looking to dabble in video playback and editing in motion, it should be more than enough to whet your appetite.
As for graphic performance, the Erazer is well surpassed by the Origin EON17-X we reviewed last winter and on par with HP Omen 17 of autumn 2016.
Laptop battery life
But, the big one is the battery, right? In our tests of laptop battery life, we found that during intense video playback, the battery lasted 2 hours and 37 minutes. So enough to get the latest Marvel film made and dusted, and maybe go through some bonus features, but not long enough to get a good ode from Peter Jackson to New Zealand through all the way.
Likewise, the PCMark 8 Home battery test reported a bit mediocre 2 hours and 53 minutes. Both figures are far from the 4 hours promised by Medion.
Final words
Ultimately, Erazer is a good job. Its soft touch finish makes the product feel premium enough but does not offer the aluminium styles we've seen from Asus, HP or Dell laptops of similar price.
That said, this laptop should feel like home to anyone who spends most of their free time games, their frame of resistance to sweaty fingerprints and greasy food stains. The performance is solid, even reliable. And, linking that GTX 1070 with a 1080p screen should mean that you are set for any AAA title that is released over the next two to three years at least, without adjusting important settings.
The price, however, and the lack of portability that comes with it, makes the Erazer less attractive than we expected. If a rotating hard disk was thrown into the mix, we might perhaps forgive it, but for what Medion is asking, well, it's just a bit too much for what's on the table.
Packing an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of memory, a 480GB SSD, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics chip and a 17.3-inch IPS 1080p enabled G-Sync display, this Erazer is not about to steal A desktop-grade gaming experience just to cut down a bit.
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| Erazer, gaming laptop comparison, laptop store |
This is a system more than capable of driving any of the latest AAA titles at 60 frames per second (fps) to 1080p, in a very detailed detail with little concern. Couple that with Nvidia's G-Sync technology, and see how the screen tearing and drop frame become a thing of the past.
Price, availability and value
But with a sale price of £1,699 (about $2,199, AU $2,937), is the Erazer worth plunking down that much for a recent date processor and an apparent lack of yarn storage? That is a lot of money, regardless of how you look, especially for the spec sheet of this laptop resellers, compared to much less desktop competition laptops.
Do not they believe us? From this writing, for £ 1,706 you can get a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU, Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD, 1TB Seagate HDD, 32GB HyperX DDR4 memory, Gigabyte GTX 1070 and 27 inch, BenQ 1440p IPS display - with a solid set Of peripherals - for almost exactly the same amount of cash.
It is a system with four times more computing power, three times more storage, twice as much memory, running on a screen 10 inches larger and with twice the resolution.
Ultimately, you are paying for that portability. For that same money or less, you could have an HP Omen 17, packed with one of the latest Intel Core i7 (Kaby Lake) processors, as well as a 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD. Likewise, you can get a custom-built Source EON17-X laptop for a few hundred plus dollars with the latest hardware.
And, honestly, we do not see a great portability game here with Erazer. It's big, it's bulky and it's too much for the car on a trip. What does it leave you? A system they essentially still leave in one place from day to day.
In terms of availability, Medion serves both the US and Canada. And the United Kingdom, as well as most of western Europe.
Design of Erazer gaming laptop
That said, Erazer is really a beauty. Although LED lighting, located around the trackpad and the back of the screen, may be less attractive to those looking for a more elegant, more professional device, the smooth touch finish that envelops the rest of the system is simply stunning.
And, while it's certainly not the most portable of notebooks, the sharp angles placed around the design keep it stylish. The bezel is a bit chunkier than we would like it to be, and the standard membrane keyboard leaves a lot to be desired (especially for the price), but there is a lot to be said for it.
What impressed, however, was the cooling system. Certainly due in part to its large size, but it was rare for us to hear the fans from the ramp, if at all.
That being said, as you would expect, fans are a little whiney when they launch, but they are nothing that a good pair of headphones can not drown. Although frankly, you should not have to, most of the time you'll be buried in a good game, so it's not something that we hang onto too much with how rare it happens.
The I / O, on the other hand - oh boy, what a compliment. With the Erazer, you could effectively run three additional displays attached to this monster.
Abundant memory, missing storage
Storage, however, is one area in which the Erazer really comes unglued. In short, you get a single SSD of 480 GB. Fill that with your operating system programs, and you will be left with less than 280GB for games, not ideal. Given that the Erazer is approaching the £ 1,700 mark, and given its gigantic dimensions, we have to ask ourselves: why is there no additional hard drive?
Fortunately, the situation with regard to memory is much happier. With two of the four DIMMs available with two RAM modules of 8GB DDR4 RAM, which means that it could launch another 16GB in good measure, giving it a total of 32GB, which is useful for multimedia rendering tasks.
However, in that scenario, a serious external HDD, or a dedicated NAS, would be almost a necessity.
Performance and gaming laptop comparison
The computational performance was slightly lower than we expected, with an average of 700 below the CineBench R15 multi-threading performance, as expected from the Skylake mobile processor buried in the heart of this beastie.
That last point is a bit tight for us. At this time, Skylake is looking positively old in the world of advancing processors. Although Lake Kaby was launched in early 2017, moving parts have been available since before December.
In addition to that, Kaby Lake X, Intel's next generation processor, is supposed to be just around the corner, which means that soon we will be able to see a lot of new moving parts hit the mainstream. Couple that with AMD promising Ryzen moving parts in the next quarter, and the ageing Skylake core seems positively decrepit.
Does that mean that the Core i7-6700HQ is a chump change at this point? Yes and no. It's still a serious contender, even in its mobile form factor, which equals roughly the same processing power as any desktop-sharp Core i5-6600K. If you are looking to dabble in video playback and editing in motion, it should be more than enough to whet your appetite.
As for graphic performance, the Erazer is well surpassed by the Origin EON17-X we reviewed last winter and on par with HP Omen 17 of autumn 2016.
Laptop battery life
But, the big one is the battery, right? In our tests of laptop battery life, we found that during intense video playback, the battery lasted 2 hours and 37 minutes. So enough to get the latest Marvel film made and dusted, and maybe go through some bonus features, but not long enough to get a good ode from Peter Jackson to New Zealand through all the way.
Likewise, the PCMark 8 Home battery test reported a bit mediocre 2 hours and 53 minutes. Both figures are far from the 4 hours promised by Medion.
Final words
Ultimately, Erazer is a good job. Its soft touch finish makes the product feel premium enough but does not offer the aluminium styles we've seen from Asus, HP or Dell laptops of similar price.
That said, this laptop should feel like home to anyone who spends most of their free time games, their frame of resistance to sweaty fingerprints and greasy food stains. The performance is solid, even reliable. And, linking that GTX 1070 with a 1080p screen should mean that you are set for any AAA title that is released over the next two to three years at least, without adjusting important settings.
The price, however, and the lack of portability that comes with it, makes the Erazer less attractive than we expected. If a rotating hard disk was thrown into the mix, we might perhaps forgive it, but for what Medion is asking, well, it's just a bit too much for what's on the table.
