Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate

Not the most refined gaming laptop, but with RTX 5090 graphics at RTX 5080 prices it's the best value of the latest crop

- TIM DANTON

Chances are that you've heard of the Medion brand. It's a division of Lenovo, which bought a controlling stake in the German company in 2011. You'll find Medion's gaming laptops in a range of British online retailers, and its prices are often among the most competitive. As it is here. The Erazer arrived too late to be included in our Labs mini of gaming & creative laptops on p68, but at £3,500 it's £499 cheaper than the HP Omen Max 16.

In terms of specification, the Beast follows the same pattern as every other big-framed gaming laptop of 2025. Intel's Core Ultra 9 275HX processor has become the de facto choice for this bulky breed, which makes sense: not only does it pack 24 cores, but its single-core performance is excellent as games demand. And as eight of those cores are geared towards performance, when you're faced with core-heavy tasks these laptops effectively laugh with joy. By which I mean that the fans kick in.

The only limitation is here 32GB of RAM; demanding users who want 64GB will have to replace the two supplied 16GB DIMMs. This is one area where the HP Omen wins, as it supplies 64GB as standard.

Easy upgrades

We're also seeing PCIe Gen 5 SSDs become the standard choice for top-end PCs and laptops, and so it is here, with Medion opting for an incredibly fast 2TB drive. It hit 9,685MB/sec sequential writes and 7,624MB/sec reads in CrystalDiskMark 8, which is roughly double the speeds of a high-quality Gen 4 SSD. There's even space for a second drive, albeit Gen 4. You have to fight past 12 crosshead screws to access this, and another three to remove the heatsink, but to have up to 4TB of storage in a laptop is surely worth the hassle.