We’ve seen press releases about them, and they were shown at CES last month. But laptops with the new Nvidia RTX 4000 series graphics cards and 13th generation Intel processors have not been available in stores. And when we’ve asked press agencies and importers, the answer has been “we don’t know yet.” But here they are. And they’re coming from an entirely unexpected quarter.
PC maker Medion, originally German but now part of Lenovo, has just unveiled a whole line of gaming laptops with the latest goodies from Nvidia and Intel under the hood. The presentation took place in Paris, and it was exciting stuff we got to see in a riverboat on the Seine.
The top-of-the-range Medion Erazer Beast X40 lives up to its name. In its best configuration, the 17-inch laptop has an Intel Core i9-13900HX processor with 24 cores and up to 5.8 GHz turbo speed. The graphics card is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090. So we’re talking monstrously powerful hardware.
While 32GB of RAM is a given in the class, and 2TB of storage seems adequate without being overkill, the keyboard was a surprise. It’s a real mechanical keyboard with Cherry keys. But in an extra-low version that looks like a regular laptop keyboard – but feels pleasantly different!
Water-cooled laptop
The machine was showcased with a “sidecar” of a box, filled with fans and RGB lights. It was not, as first assumed, an external graphics accelerator à la Asus ROG Flow X13; but rather a water-cooled cooling unit!
The Erazer Beast X40 can be used standalone, but when you really need to work (or play) hard, you can attach the cooling unit to the computer with a pair of hoses. Car owners will feel right at home, as there’s a filler cap for extra cooling water on top. The cooling unit is sold separately.
Medion was sold years ago through discount chain Aldi. But the company is clearly keen to shake off any discount image, and the product range seems both promising – and anything but cheap. The top model will cost just under €4,500 when it goes on sale in mid-February. The water-cooling unit is not included in the price, and must be purchased separately for €249.
A smaller model, the Medion Erazer Major X20, gets the same processor options, but has to settle for GeForce RTX 4070 graphics. In the strongest configuration, the price is €2,499.
We are the first media in Europe to have the opportunity to get our hands on one of the new Erazer machines, and will be back with a test as soon as possible.
