construction
The Medion Erazer Beast X40 is a gaming laptop that uses the codes of gaming, including a backlit logo on its plastic shell and two transparent inserts on the air vents, illuminated by RGB LEDs. The entire case is made of plastic and easily picks up fingerprints.
The design of this notebook does not belong to Medion. This is a model offered by several brands around the world and adapted for Medion. So it is possible to find an identical model from XMG on the other side of the Rhine or even from CyberPowerPC on the other side of the Atlantic.
Plastics tend to retain fingerprints.
© The Digital
Opening 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 have 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 ways to tame him. Double-clicking on the tile in the top left deactivates it, while double-clicking in the top right only deactivates the right half of the area. In use, gliding is pleasant, but often gives the impression of getting lost on this large surface. Small apartment for the often neglected right-click; You really need to press the bottom right corner to confirm the requested action.
Close-up of the optional water cooling connector.
© The Digital
The connections are distributed on the sides and the back of the Erazer Beast X40. There is a USB3.0 port and headphone/microphone jacks on the left; on the back an HDMI port, a Thunderbolt4 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port and the connection for the water cooling kit. Two USB3.0 ports and an SD card reader complete the connections on the right side of the case.
For the wireless part, Medion uses the Intel AX211 chip that allows connecting the Beast X40 with Wi-Fi 6E at 2400 Mb/s and Bluetooth 5.3. The onboard webcam is of poor quality; its 720p sensor doesn’t perform miracles and playback is really bad.
Air extraction close-up.
© The Digital
Cooling on the Erazer Beast X40 is substantial to cool the zeal of the Core i9 and GeForce RTX 4090. No fewer than 6 heat pipes are responsible for transferring the released calories to the four radiators placed in the corners below the screen. Two fans ventilate all that out of the case.
The temperature on the keyboard under the thermal imaging camera is around 45°C. It even reaches 46.4°C at piano level. The warming is mostly concentrated in the middle of the keyboard; the ZQSD keys and the arrow keys not far from the fans stay cool.
In view of the on-board configuration, the temperatures are rather limited.
© The Digital
Medion offers 3 ventilation modes. The first (“Office”) is the equivalent of a silent mode; the second (“Balance”) corresponds to the “balanced” mode; the last mode (“Turbo”) speaks for itself. A button right next to the start button allows you to switch between modes without having to go through the control software.
The “Office” mode doesn’t allow gaming because the performance is drastically limited. The frequencies of the processor then jojon and allow to maintain a relatively low sound level (37.9 dB measured). The “Balance” mode lets the fans have their say (44.1 dB). Finally, the Turbo mode completely frees the frequencies and the noise pollution increases to 45.9 dB; a considerable volume, but far from the loudest models, which often exceed 52 dB. Depending on the operating mode, the Medion Erazer Beast X40 delivers 105 fps, 115 fps or 119 fps in the game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in 2560 x 1600. Despite a frame rate that appears high in “Office”, the game is unplayable due to sudden drops in fluidity, which sometimes go to 4 fps drop.
The cooling system is impressive.
© The Digital
To access the components, you need to remove 12 screws under the fuselage and 2 more screws around the water cooling connector. The hull then comes off easily.
Inside, the components are accessible and easily removable, except of course the processor and graphics card which are welded to the motherboard.
The repairability index is also given by Medion as 9.1/10.
Performance
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’s accompanied by 32GB of DDR5, a GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile (175W), and two 1TB NVMe SSDs.
Processor performance index (the larger the better).
© The Digital
Armed in this way, the Medion Erazer Beast X40 achieves a performance index of 248 with its Core i9-13900HX. At the same time, it allows making fun of the Core i9-13980HX of the Razer Blade 16, which has achieved an index of 245. This is explained by the more powerful cooling system of the Erazer. At the moment, the Intel Core 13 HX series processors are unrivaled and we’ll have to wait for AMD’s response with its Ryzen 7040 to hope for a little competition.
In use, the Erazer Beast X40’s Core i9-13900HX P-cores averaged 3.56 GHz during our video encoding and 3.03 GHz for its E-cores.
SSDs flirt with 7 GB/s reading and 5 GB/s writing; enough to quickly shift games or video noise. Windows will be more than happy with such speeds.
games
As a reminder, the Beast X40’s Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 mobile GPU is identical to the desktop RTX 4080, but with reduced power draw to fit in a laptop PC. The envelope of the Medion is fixed at 150 W, with an additional 25 W Dynamic Boost; For comparison, the desktop version has an envelope of 320 watts.
GPU performance index (bigger is better).
© The Digital
The Medion Erazer Beast X40’s in-game performance score of 389 is 7% higher than the Razer Blade 16 with the same graphics card. This difference can also be explained by a more efficient cooling system. Compared to the MSI GE76 Raider and its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (175W), 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 frame rate obtained in our gaming panel with all details maxed out in Full HD (1920 x 1080):
Full HD frames per second (bigger is better).
© The Digital
Apart from Cyberpunk 2077, all games tested in rasterization exceed 150 fps and sometimes even 200 fps. Enabling ray tracing has a huge impact on framerate, with a performance drop of around 40%. However, all games are still largely playable. Enabling DLSS makes it possible to find performances close to that of rasterization, while DLSS3’s Frame Generation option in Cyberpunk 2077 boosts the framerate to 156 fps with ray tracing enabled.
Since the Medion Erazer Beast X40 is equipped with a panel with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 at 240 Hz, we also tested our gaming panel in this resolution to check whether it is still playable.
Frame rate in 2560 x 1600 (bigger is better).
© The Digital
Even at 2560×1600, the GeForce RTX 4090 allows you to play all games smoothly on our panel. Even with activated raytraced rendering and without using DLSS, gaming with more than 60 fps is possible. Small exceptions for The Medium and Cyberpunk 2077, which require DLSS to go above 60fps.
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Mobility / Autonomy
The Erazer Beast X40 is a big baby at 38.3 cm wide, 3.6 cm thick and weighs 2.8 kg. The 330 W charger tips the scales at 1.17 kg. The set easily fits in a backpack.
The 330 W charger is impressive.
©Digital.
On the autonomy side, the Erazer Beast X40 lasted 4 h 25 min with our usual test protocol (Netflix on Chrome with the screen set to 200 cd / m²). A performance similar to that of its competitors, notably the Blade 16, which has a very similar configuration.
Autonomy (the bigger the better).
© The Digital
strong points
Monstrous performance.
Controlled cooling.
Keyboard with mechanical switches.
weak points
Mediocre webcam.
Poor quality plastics.
Disappointing speakers.
Diploma
Global brand
How does the classification work?
The Medion Erazer Beast X40 meets all requirements. Its performance is top notch and its cooling is on par with its components. It’s slightly more powerful than one of its main competitors, Razer’s Blade 16, but makes some concessions on the screen. No concessions on the price, which remains stratospheric like all RTX 4090 Mobile equipped laptops.