Medion Erazer Beast X30 review: high-end gaming at an appealing price

One glance at the specs of the Medion Erazer Beast X30 is enough to tell you that this is potentially one of the best gaming laptops you're going to come across at the moment – and our in-depth review will tell you everything you need to know about this machine.

We'll cover everything from battery life to frame rates to the soundsystem, and having extensively tested the laptop, we can speak from first-hand experience. If you want to make an informed purchasing decision, our review is the only one you're going to need.

Our Medion Erazer Beast X30 review should help you decide if this is the best gaming laptop for you. Once you've made that decision, you can take a look at our best gaming monitors, the best gaming keyboards, and the best gaming mice as well.

Medion Erazer Beast X30: price and availability

You can pick up the Medion Erazer Beast X30 right now from a variety of different retailers, including Amazon, Ebuyer and Overclockers. The pricing will of course depend on the internal spec configurations that you decide to go for, but at the time of writing the starting price is in the region of £1,800 – check the widget on this page for the best offers available online right now. The laptop is not currently available in the US.

Medion Erazer Beast X30 review: design and screen

The Medion Erazer Beast X30 is something of a mixed bag in terms of its design: the customisable RGB lighting on the keyboard and along the front can be quite flamboyant and vivid, depending on how you set them up, while the rest of the aesthetic is rather plain. Turn off its lights and you're left with a rather chunky laptop that looks like it's ready for a boardroom meeting or some serious spreadsheeting.

Of course subtle and plain design is just fine for a lot of gamers. The 17.3-inch screen dictates the size of the chassis, and there's room for a number pad on the keyboard – though we would've liked to see a larger trackpad. Overall, the laptop measures 395 x 261 x 26mm, so you should be able to figure out if it's going to fit on your desk, and it weighs a respectable 2.25kgs.

As for that 17.3-inch display itself, you get a native resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels and an impressive 240Hz refresh rate, for a really fluid gaming experience. Upping the resolution to 4K might have been nice, but we can certainly live with 1440p, and the screen is bright, vibrant and detailed (maximum brightness is rated at 300 nits, though, which doesn't read as the highest going). Whether you're spending your time gaming or sitting back to watch some movies, you won't have any complaints.

When it comes to connectivity, there's an Ethernet port, one HDMI 2.1 socket, three USB-A slots (two USB 3.2 Gen 1 and one USB 3.2 Gen 2), and a USB-C port (supporting both USB 3 and Thunderbolt 4.0). You also get an integrated webcam and microphone, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a microSD card slot. While it's not the most well-connected gaming laptop we've ever seen (no DisplayPort, for example), it will have enough for most users.

Medion Erazer Beast X30 review: performance and features

The Medion Erazer Beast X30 that we have in for review came fitted with a 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900HK processor, 32GB RAM, 1TB storage, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU – an intimidating specs list by anyone's standards. It's the most expensive configuration of the X30 range, with a retail price of around £2,700, but you can save yourself some money if you don't need quite so much RAM or processing power.

We tried a variety of games on the laptop, and it passed with flying colours every time: smooth, detailed visuals and high frame rates even with graphics settings cranked way up. We were able to get around 60-80 frames per second on average in Red Dead Redemption 2, and way over 100fps on GTA V. No matter what game you're playing in 2022, this gaming laptop is going to be able to handle it, thanks to its high-end specs.

All this performance does come at a cost though: the Medion Erazer Beast X30 does tend to get very loud and very hot when it's being pushed – loud enough to be heard unless you've set the laptop volume to an almost deafening level, and too hot on the underside of the chassis to comfortably touch with your fingers. This is a laptop that you're going to need to keep on a hard flat surface to avoid it overheating.

In the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, the laptop scored a very respectable 12,033, which blows away the averages for a gaming laptop (5,730), a gaming PC (9,216) and even a high-end gaming PC (11,085). By the benchmark's own reckoning, that's enough to play Battlefield V at a 1440p resolution with the settings set to Ultra at more than 115fps. In terms of Time Spy averages, it's only beaten by the premium gaming PC score (19,781).

The soft-touch keys on the keyboard are a pleasure to type on, while the trackpad is suitably responsive, if a little cheap feeling when it comes to clicking. 

The customisation software you get with the Medion Erazer Beast X30 gives you a decent number of lighting options for the keyboard and the bar at the front, from shimmering rainbows to fixed colours, and you can turn the lights off completely if you prefer.

There are two speakers installed inside the laptop, supporting THX Spatial Audio, and the sound quality you get from them is clearly above average – if not quite best in class. They'll do fine for games and movies, no problem at all, though serious gamers and audiophiles will want to invest in some additional hardware. It's another area in which Medion has put together a solid set of components.

When you're not gaming, the Medion Erazer Beast X30 is a perfectly decent laptop, albeit a rather big and chunky one. It's not the sort of laptop you can just sling in a backpack casually, even if it is relatively light in its field. If you're going to be doing a lot of non-gaming stuff on your new laptop, then it might be worth going for a model that's built to be more of an all-rounder than this one is.

Battery life is never a strong selling point when it comes to gaming laptops, and so it is here too: an hour of video streaming at maximum display brightness and a low volume drains the battery by almost 50 per cent. If you're doing intensive gaming, you're going to run it down even faster than that, so you're not going to be able to take this away from a power socket for very long at all.

Medion Erazer Beast X30 review: verdict

If you're after a high performance gaming laptop with a 17-inch screen then the Medion Erazer Beast X30 has just about everything you could ask for, and at a competitive price. 

Despite all that power, this isn't necessarily the best gaming laptop for everyone though: you need to decide if the aesthetic is one that works for you, and whether there's enough in the way of connectivity to keep you satisfied.

The loudness and the high temperatures when the laptop is under load are considerations to take into account. They won't really spoil your gaming, but these are perhaps areas where competitors do slightly better than Medion does. It's also worth bearing in mind that if you get a gaming laptop from the likes of Asus or Razer, for example, then you get a choice of matching accessories to go with it, which isn't the case with Medion.

Remember that with the RTX 3080 Ti inside this laptop has the best GPU available right now, so you're not exactly going to get one on the cheap. We would certainly say the Medion ticks the box for value for money despite this.

Also consider

You don't have to get a long way down our best gaming laptops guide to see that you've got a wealth of very good options to pick from. If you want to stick with the 17-inch size, then the Razer Blade 17 is an obvious choice: Razer laptops just ooze style and class, and have high-end gaming components to match. You will, however, have to pay more for it compared with the Medion.

We're also happy to recommend the Asus ROG Zephyrus S17, another laptop that provides top-tier gaming performance, at a price. The screen and build quality are excellent on this particular model, and you get a lot in the way of connectivity options and accessories as well. The GPU options top out at the GeForce RTX 3080 though, so it's not quite as powerful as the Medion option.