Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate review: what a beast

For quite a long time now, I've felt that the best gaming laptop for most people is probably a 16-inch one. You get a screen that's big enough to enjoy on its own merits in most situations, but don't have to lug around a laptop the size of your entire torso. It's also big enough to potentially house a bunch of proper components, instead of cutting corners for size's sake.

Medion might not be the biggest name in the gaming laptop market, but its new offering nonetheless underlines how good a 16-inch laptop can be. The Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate lives up to its name in power, but I'm impressed by its design, which really doesn't have much wrong with it. I used the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 model for a week to put it through its paces – and see why it is, indeed, such a beast.

Price & Availability

The Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate is available to order now from a range of specialist retailers, and comes in at a chunky £2,999.99 from most of these (with a theoretical RRP of £3,4999 that I'm not seeing reflected anywhere).

That 'Ultimate' in the name denotes the inclusion of a top-of-the-line Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, but you can also pick up the Erazer Beast 16 X1 with a 5080 for a little less cash. As you'll see in our price widget up above, this brings the price down to below £2,500 with current deals, which is impressive.

Design

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that the Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 is a slimline laptop to rival the Razer Blade 16 or Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, but I'm nonetheless impressed by the work Medion has done to make it manageable for portability. This is a simple but well-made laptop that does the basics well in terms of build.

It's finished all over in brushed metal, with just a small blue Medion logo on the back of the laptop to identify it. The Erazer Beast 16 X1 does have a small jutting-out rear, which has become the norm in gaming laptops over recent years, but it only goes back about 1cm from the hinge, which makes it feel well-sized.

The underside of the laptop features two large rubber rails for stability, along with a lattice-patterned series of ventilation holes for airflow. The charging port is right on the back of the laptop, along with an HDMI port, a mini DisplayPort, and a USB 4 Type-C port with display output.

The left-hand edge of the laptop offers up an Ethernet port (which is very handy), a USB-C port and a USB-A port, and a headphone jack. The other side, finally, holds two more USB-A ports and a full-sized memory card reader.

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Opening up the laptop, you'll be greeted by a 16-inch display, the specs of which I'll cover later, and a full keyboard including a slightly shrunken numpad. I'm not the biggest fan of numpad inclusion, but when it's done like this, it's not much of a space-grabber.

Above this, there's a power button and a macro button to swap between power modes, while the touchpad resides under the keyboard as you'd expect. Above the display, there's a webcam which has a manual privacy slider, another appreciated little touch.

Each of those keys is backlit with full RGB, and you can program them all on a per-key basis if you want to get into the weeds. Along the very bottom of the laptop's edge, where your wrists sit, there's also a strip of LEDs that project downward onto a table surface – again, these can be programmed to be quite loud and obvious, or turned off entirely.

All in all, I like how clean and simple the Erazer Beast 16 X1 is, and while it weighs in at 2.67kg, I think it's one of the more portable 16-inch laptops I've tested outside of the notebook-style category of the Razer Blade or Asus ROG Zephyrus G.

Specs & Features

The aforementioned RTX 5090 is at the heart of the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate, and it makes for a pretty beasty setup, but it's far from the only impressive component in this premium laptop.

It's paired with an Intel Ultra Core 9 275HX processor from the Arrow Lake family, which means you're not going to be CPU-bound any time soon, along with 32GB of DDR5 5600 MHz RAM for multitasking and general responsiveness that lives up to the rest of the package.

For storing your game collection, you get a 2TB NVMe PCIe Gen4x4 SSD, which should be enough space for plenty, even with ballooning file sizes.

On the display front, Medion has gone with a 16-inch QHD+ 300Hz Mini-LED panel, which manages a resolution of 2560 x 1600, and peak brightness of 500 nits. That makes for a really sharp experience that doesn't shoot for native 4K, of which I approve. On a display this size, there's just no point – and you lose nothing by saving on performance.

That said, some people might have preferred an OLED panel, which is starting to become more common in high-end laptops like the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI that I tested recently. If it meant lower refresh rates to keep costs even, though, it comes down to a matter of taste.

From an audio point of view, there are technically six speakers in the Medion laptop's array – four 2W speakers and two 2W woofers. This makes for decent enough audio in a pinch, but I'd expect that the vast majority of users will spend the vast majority of their time hooked into one of the best gaming headsets on the market if they can.

Medion preloads some software onto the laptop, including the dreaded McAfee trial, but its core Medion Control Centre app is mercifully simple and effective, offering controls for power modes and light settings among other options.

Performance

Of course, all of the above leaves us to discuss how the Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate performs when gaming, and it very much lives up to its name. When plugged into power, this laptop's 5090 makes absolute mincemeat of well-optimised games, and has the brute force to power through even terribly balanced ones.

I've been using Doom: The Dark Ages as my main benchmark in a recent run of laptop reviews, and at the time of writing, none of my units has matched the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate in it.

With frame generation turned off, running at 1440p at maximum settings, I was averaging almost exactly 120fps in-game, but using frame generation (the signature feature of this generation of RTX cards) unlocked huge amounts of headroom. Turning it up to the maximum setting of 4X, I saw frame rates hit 270fps, which is about as high as you could dream about.

These sorts of gains were echoed in the new remaster of Oblivion, which already has a justified reputation as a resource hog, and underlined how impressive frame-gen can be for these sorts of portable machines.

The Mini-LED display, meanwhile, is pretty superb, with really good depth to its dark colours, but the capacity to get really bright when needed – it threads the needle nicely. Being able to hit 300Hz also means that if you're a competitive gamer, you should see crazy frame rates from the likes of Counter-Strike 2 or Valorant.

Play on battery power, of course, and you'll be hamstrung down by default settings that seek to maximise battery life at all costs – you can disable these if you take a wrench to your settings, but it's not really advisable. At this size and weight, I don't think you're looking to the Erazer Beast 16 X1 for playing on the move.

Along those lines, the constant bane of the best gaming laptops does rear its head here – fan noise is inescapable. In truth, the Erazer Beast 16 X1 doesn't fare too badly here, with fans that aren't in the "plane lifting off" category that some other devices can suffer. Still, they're loud enough to be really noticeable and make that optional headset feel more mandatory.

Battery life when you're on the go is also a weak point, unsurprisingly, at least compared to most laptops. You should be able to get through a good few hours of web browsing and normal use, but if you start gaming, you'll be lucky to get much more than a couple. That, of course, all comes in the context of gaming laptops, against which backdrop it becomes far more forgivable.

Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate review: Verdict

Medion has made a really impressive laptop in the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate – one that marries some smart design decisions to great specs. By choosing to go a little thicker and heavier, rather than expanding the Erazer Beast 16 X1's footprint, it ultimately makes its laptop feel more compact than it actually is.

When you stick an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU in the mix, meanwhile, the performance results speak for themselves – and it makes mincemeat of modern releases. That means it should be a safe buy if you want a gaming laptop to last a good few years, albeit this won't be one to use on the go if productivity is an aim.

Also consider

If you want something even bigger than Medion's laptop, there's always the MSI Stealth 18 HX AI, which is suitably massive – although as a consequence, its GPU is a step down, using the 5070 Ti. It's a great larger option though.

For those who want something stealthier and smaller, though, I'd recommend taking a look at the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025), which is on the other end of the scale. It could pass for a MacBook, but still manages to boast a 5070 for discrete gaming when you need it.