Depending on where you live, the name Medion might not ring any bells. The company makes a wide range of hardware, including some surprisingly powerful and competitively priced laptops. Even if Medion is unfamiliar, its parent company probably isn't – Lenovo, the Chinese tech giant, acquired Medion back in 2011.
Today, we're looking at one of Medion's most ambitious machines to date: the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate.
Part of the brand's gaming and creator-focused Erazer lineup, this laptop packs serious firepower. Inside, you'll find an RTX 5080 GPU, Intel's Core Ultra 9 275HX, 32GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, and a 2TB SSD. The 16-inch mini-LED display hits a sharp 2,560 by 1,600 resolution and refreshes at a buttery-smooth 300Hz.
The Beast makes a bold first impression. Its Tonfang chassis features a brushed metal finish, a glowing blue Medion logo, and a front-facing LED light strip that makes its gaming DNA impossible to miss.
Weighing in at around 5.8 pounds (2.67 kg), it's a touch lighter than many of its 16-inch rivals – though not quite as slim as ultra-premium machines like the Razer Blade. It measures about 30 millimeters thick, which is definitely on the thicker side compared to the likes of ROG Zephyrus G16. The laptop ships with a hefty 420W power brick that adds another 1.45 pounds to your gear bag.
One standout feature: the display can tilt back a full 180 degrees. It's a rarity on gaming laptops and not strictly necessary, but it offers peace of mind if you tend to push your screens to the limit.
It can open almost flat, and while it might not have a huge number of practical uses, you can at least not worry about pushing the screen too far back and risk breaking it.
Flip the machine over and you'll find four large vent areas with a hexagonal pattern, along with additional cooling sections and a couple of rubber strips that improve airflow and keep the laptop stable on smooth surfaces.
Connectivity, Ports, Keyboard
The port selection in the Erazer Beast 16 is quite extensive: two USB 3.1 Gen 1 and a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 inputs, USB 4 Type-C, HDMI 2.1, mini DisplayPort 2.1a, 2.5Gbit ethernet port, a full-size card reader, and a Headphone / Mic socket.
The laptop also comes with an input on the rear for the optional Erazer water cooling kit.
I did enjoy the Beast 16 X1's chiclet keyboard. It offers impressive feedback, good travel, and the keys are pretty stiff, so it was rare that I accidently hit the wrong one. The chassis never jumped around under my often heavy-handed typing, either.
The full-size arrow keys are certainly welcome, especially if you use them in games. There's also a numpad that has been noticeably squashed to fit in place, which not everyone might appreciate.
The full RGB per-key lighting gets nice and bright. Like the LED light strip that sits on the front edge and illuminates surfaces, each key is programmable, with a vast array of colors and lighting patterns available. If you want everyone around you to know you're on a gaming laptop, or you play in the dark a lot, you'll enjoy the wide range of RGB options.
There's also a "Mode" button next to the power button for switching between Silence, Balance, Gaming, and the user-defined modes.
The trackpad, meanwhile, is perfectly fine: it may not stand out but there's certainly nothing to complain about. It's a good size, has nice nice feedback, and is reliable.
Display
The display is probably the best feature of this machine: a 16-inch mini-LED panel with a 2,560 x 1,600 resolution (16:10) and 300Hz refresh rate. With 1,000 full-array local-dimming zones, a Delta E of less than 1, 100 % DCI-P3 coverage, 500 nits peak brightness, and HDR 1,000 certification, it looks stunning – Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 stood out as being especially pretty, with almost no noticeable blooming or light bleed.
Mini-LED might not have the perfect blacks or the superb vividness of OLED, but it still makes other monitors look drab in comparison.
It's also brighter than OLED – I was especially impressed at being able to use the laptop outdoors in glaring sun without much issue, thanks to the matte panel finish. The viewing angles are great, too.
Then there's the refresh rate. At 300Hz, it's one of the fastest laptops on the market. Strangely, I had to enable this option in the BIOS as it was showing just 60Hz or 240Hz in Windows.
Esports titles like Counter-Strike 2 are going to make the most of that refresh rate, of course. Having an RTX 5080 does mean you get access to multi-frame generation, so if you can stand fake frames, you can always enable it to get closer to the 300 fps limit.
Sound
After the display, the next standout feature of the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate is its sound. With four 2W tweeters and two 2W woofers, this laptop can get loud enough to be used as a house party speaker. I recorded almost 90 decibels at full volume when playing music from around a foot away.
The laptop also comes with SteelSeries' Nahimic audio-optimization suite. The app is often pre-installed on gaming laptops and motherboards, allowing enhanced and improved sound. I found the voice enhancement feature was useful for mumbly, difficult-to-hear content on streaming services like Netflix.
Gaming Performance
The Beast 16 X1 Ultimate comes with a 150W RTX 5080 mobile GPU with 25W dynamic boost. There are some overclocking options in the Command Center software, and while this did add a few extra frames in certain titles, the improvements were often minor and at the cost of extra noise.
I tested 8 games at the laptop's 2560 x 1600 max resolution with no overclocking and the laptop set to Gaming mode. One test was run in native resolution and one with DLSS Balanced enabled, as many people use the latter setting to push up framerates.
Native 2560 x 1 600 in Gaming Mode
| Doom: The Dark Ages/ Hebeth | Nightmare / DLAA | 71 | 59 | 84 | 60 | 56 |
| Doom: The Dark Ages / Hebeth | Ultra Nightmare / DLSS Balanced | 95 | 78 | 109 | 77 | 74 |
| Space Marine 2 / Mission 3: Machinus Divinitus | High / Native | 85 | 69 | 103 | 62 | 52 |
| Space Marine 2 / Mission 3: Machinus Divinitus | Ultra / Balanced | 87 | 74 | 101 | 64 | 35 |
|
Black Myth: Wukong/ Yellow Wind Sage boss |
Very High / DLAA | 70 | 52 | 86 | 27 | 24 |
| Black Myth: Wukong / Yellow Wind Sage boss | Cinematic / Balanced | 89 | 64 | 106 | 51 | 19 |
| Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 / Camp | High preset / DLAA | 68 | 46 | 83 | 59 | 52 |
| Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 / Camp | Epic / DLSS Balanced | 84 | 66 | 104 | 43 | 19 |
| Avowed / Emerald Stair (Fior Mes Iverno) | High / No upscaling | 73 | 60 | 95 | 46 | 35 |
| Avowed / Emerald Stair (Fior Mes Iverno) | Epic / DLSS Balanced | 72 | 62 | 88 | 46 | 36 |
| Cyberpunk 2077 / Japantown driving | High settings / No upscaling | 81 | 69 | 99 | 54 | 45 |
| Cyberpunk 2077 / Japantown driving | RT Low preset / DLSS Balanced | 94 | 79 | 112 | 63 | 47 |
| Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 / Bishop Takes Rook | Extreme preset / No upscaling | 105 | 84 | 134 | 81 | 74 |
| Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 / Bishop Takes Rook | Extreme preset / DLSS Balanced | 122 | 106 | 145 | 99 | 90 |
| Baldur's Gate 3 / Baldur's Gate | Ultra preset / No upscaling | 100 | 76 | 137 | 71 | 23 |
| Baldur's Gate 3 / Baldur's Gate | Ultra preset / DLSS Balanced | 110 | 80 | 150 | 76 | 33 |
The results were mostly quite close to what the average flagship RTX 5090 laptop produces. They were also in line or exceeded the results of many other high-end RTX 5080 laptops, and track very closely with top-tier RTX 4090 machines.
Synthetic Benchmarks
The Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX in the Beast 16 X1 consists of 24 cores made up of 8 fast performance cores of up to 5.4 GHz and 16 smaller efficiency cores running up to 4.6 GHz. It also has 40 MB L2 cache and 36 MB L3 cache.
| 3DMark | Steel Nomad | 5,126 |
| 3DMark | Time Spy | 21,330 |
| Cinebench R23 | Single Core | 2,162 |
| Cinebench R23 | Multi Core | 31,587 |
| 7-Zip | Compressing | 112.5 MB/s |
| 7-Zip | Decompressing | 196.1 MB/s |
Battery Life, Noise, Temperatures
Like most high-powered gaming rigs, the Beast 16 X1 does not thrive away from an outlet. Its 99Wh battery drains quickly under any serious load. Medion's default battery-saving mode during unplugged gameplay results in a choppy, underwhelming experience, though you can disable it if you prefer better performance over battery life.
Watching videos on the go? Manage your expectations. At 80 percent brightness, keyboard backlighting off, and volume at 40, the laptop managed just over two hours of continuous YouTube playback before shutting down.
This is not a machine built for long-haul flights or unplugged marathons – but then again, nobody buys a chunky, heavy gaming laptop expecting portability to be its strong suit.
One of the laptop's biggest tradeoffs is fan noise. Despite the excellent display and impressively loud speakers, the system can get uncomfortably loud under pressure... enough to make you wonder if the speakers were designed to drown out the cooling fans.
Webcam privacy shutter
Even in Silent mode, fan noise hits 43 dB, which is still too loud for most quiet spaces and offers minimal performance headroom. Balanced mode drops the volume slightly to 40 dB while giving a decent performance bump. Switch to Gaming mode, and the fans spin up to 61 dB, which is hard to ignore unless you are wearing headphones or have your speakers maxed out.
Thermals are surprisingly well-managed for a machine this powerful (thanks to all that noise most likely). We wish the balanced profile could do better in only throttling the fan when needed, but not all the time.
Fighting off a swarm of Tyranids in Space Marine 2, CPU and GPU temps peaked at 75°C in Gaming mode. Overclocking with the fan boost option actually brought average temps down slightly, but of course, that meant even more noise. Externally, the chassis stayed cool enough and in line with other RTX 5080 laptops.
Wrap Up
The Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate is a powerhouse of a gaming laptop. It brings together some of the best hardware around, including the RTX 5080 and Core Ultra 9 chip, with generous RAM and storage. But what really sells it is the screen and sound. The mini-LED panel is gorgeous, and everything is so smooth and silky on that 300Hz refresh rate.
With some of the loudest sound production I've heard on a laptop, this can happily replace many desktop gaming machines. It's also well-priced right now.
Currently selling for around £2,500 in the UK (roughly $3,350), the Beast 16 X1 undercuts similarly spec'ed rivals. For comparison, MSI's Vector 16 with the same RTX 5080 and Core Ultra 9 processor costs about £100 more and lacks the 300Hz Mini LED display, while weighing nearly a kilogram more.
The Erazer Beast 16 X1 is not without compromises. The fans are loud, and the size and weight make this anything but travel-friendly. Still, for the price, it delivers excellent value and performance, enough to give more established gaming brands a serious run for their money.
English (US) ·