Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate (RTX 5080) Review

Introduction

The Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate (RTX 5080) might just be one of the surprise packages of a gaming laptop in 2025.

That’s largely because Medion isn’t a brand known to most for putting out powerhouse laptops or desktops, but I’m pleased to say they do, and they make a damn good go of it.

This Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate sits behind the flagship RTX 5090 model that I have also tested, with this sample coming with the beefy RTX 5080 laptop GPU inside, as well as with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, 32GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and a huge 16-inch QHD+ 300Hz Mini LED screen.

As you’d expect, it also comes with a hefty price tag, costing £2999.99, although it does have the specs to justify that higher price. I’ve been testing it for the last couple of weeks to see if it’s one of the best gaming laptops we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Sublime look and feel
• Exemplary port selection
• Responsive keyboard and trackpad

As you might expect from a laptop that costs as much as this one, the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate’s build quality is second-to-none. It’s a fully metal frame with a smooth and smart finish that’s a far cry from the brash and aggressive styling you used to get from these kinds of laptops.

A 2.8kg weight isn’t unreasonable for a laptop of this power, or with as premium a build. It’s still also reasonably thin at 30mm, which also gives it room to accommodate a far-reaching and modern selection of inputs.

On the left side are a 2.5-Gig Ethernet port, as well as USB-A, USB-C, and a headphone jack. The right side houses a further two USB-As and a full-size SD card reader. It’s on the back where most of the ports are, with a proper HDMI 2.1 port, as well as DC-in for power, another USB-C and mini DisplayPort 2.1a, It’s quite a cutting-edge selection.

On previous recent flagship Medion laptops, they have employed Cherry’s MX Ultra Low Profile switches for an especially positive and tactile feel, and it’s a shame not to find them on the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate. With this in mind, the membrane keys here are still solid, with a snappy, short travel in a sensible layout complete with arrow keys, number pad and function row.

The keyboard is also RGB-backlit with a vibrant underglow and is fully addressable, while you’ll also find some flashy lights on the front side of the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate. None of it feels tacky, and adds to the overall aesthetic.

The Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate’s trackpad is of a reasonable size, and feels smooth and especially responsive under-finger.

Display and Speakers

• Bright, high-res screen
• Smooth refresh rate
• Speakers are surprisingly good

Medion also hasn’t skimped out when it comes to the screen either, opting for a jam-packed choice with a 16-inch Mini LED-backlit panel with a QHD+, or 2560×1600 resolution, and a super responsive 300Hz refresh rate.

Perhaps rather unsurprisingly, this makes for an excellent screen with good detail and especially smooth motion that works well in a range of games, while it can also get plenty bright. My colorimeter measured a punchy peak brightness of 557.7 nits, and Medion also says it can go as high as 1000 nits in support content for HDR with HDR1000 support.

With this in mind, it feels a little disappointing elsewhere, with 1030:1 contrast and a 0.29 black level out of the box that feels more typically IPS than they do Mini LED. It’s fine, but we have seen more premium gaming laptops opt for an OLED screen that has a lot more punch and dynamic range.

Colour accuracy here is solid, with 100% sRGB coverage proving the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate to deliver mainstream colours perfectly, while its 81% DCI-P3 and 79% Adobe RGB results even out to prove this panel could be somewhat suited for creative, colour-sensitive tasks if you wished to undertake them.

The speakers here are also surprisingly solid with good volume and body, and a decent amount of bass, too. They’re some of the better laptop speakers I’ve used.

Performance

• Immense performance in benchmarks and games
• Smooth and responsive, with the powers of Multi-Frame-Gen
• Capacious and fast SSD

The headline feature is with the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate’s internals, with this being one of the first proper RTX 50-series gaming laptops I’ve looked at. It’s an option that marries some properly high-end components with an RTX 5080 laptop GPU and a capable Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor.

The Core Ultra 9 275HX is Intel’s second-in-command in its range of Arrow Lake Ultra laptop chips behind the 285HX, but still packs an almighty punch with 24 cores (split between 8 Performance cores and 16 Efficiency Cores) and 24 threads, as well as a boost clock of up to 5.4GHz.

It’s easily one of the best laptop processors we’ve tested in this shell, with some high-riding scores in both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23. Single-core performance is strong, as is the multi-threaded tests where you can take advantage of the plethora of cores available, even if Intel hasn’t put hyperthreading on this chip.

The results in the 3D Mark Time Spy benchmark test and in gaming workloads also present a good uplift in performance against laptops that have the RTX 4090 inside, such as our previous favourite, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D.

The brunt of it is that the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate is easily one of the fastest and best performing gaming laptops I’ve tested, outside of its RTX 5090-powered sibling that provides a small boost in FPS numbers. For reference, we’re getting 88.09fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 103fps in Returnal at QHD, which is truly excellent, albeit without any upscaling or ray-tracing applied. Esports titles will also nearly max out the 300Hz refresh rate, with Rainbow Six Extraction at 235fps at 1080p, and 169fps at 1440p.

Adding in the new DLSS Transformer model into the mix in Cyberpunk 2077 did push the result at this laptop’s full 2560×1600 resolution up to 110.04fps, which is excellent, and boosted the 1080p result to 144.61fps. It also helped improve results with ray-tracing at its Ultra preset, with the 1080p result going from 57.17fps without DLSS to 82.35fps.

Being a 50-series laptop means the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate benefits from Nvidia’s clever Multi-Frame-Gen tech that adds in up to three ‘fake frames’ for every traditionally generated one thanks to AI for a perceivably smoother experience. The addition of these frames is reliant upon a base FPS figure that is high enough to mean the displayed image with Multi Frame Gen isn’t choppy or laggy.

With this, it’s able to mean you can take advantage of high refresh rate displays with smooth and responsive output without much of a penalty in latency. With the maximum 4x applied, it was able to take ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 and push it to 264.37fps at 1080p, virtually maximising the 300Hz screen on this laptop. At full 2560×1600, it resulted in an impressive 194.02fps.

This Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate comes with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a capacious 2TB SSD in this spec, which is also one of the fastest SSDs I’ve tested ,thanks to read speeds of 9773.71 MB/s and write speeds of 7631.68 MB/s putting it firmly as a PCIe 5.0 option.

Software

• Quite a clean Windows 11 install
• Medion Control Center is handy for controlling system functions
• Not enough AI horsepower to be a Copilot+ PC

The Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate comes running Windows 11 and has one of the cleaner installs, including coming with McAfee antivirus.

There is also only one piece of Medion’s own software, with the Medion Control Center app allowing for convenient access to controlling settings such as the backlighting of the keyboard and light bar on the front, as well as for toggling settings such as the laptop’s power mode and such. It’s a handy catch-all app.

As much as there is a Copilot key on this laptop for waking Microsoft’s AI assistant, this laptop isn’t powerful enough on the AI front to become one of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs with its extra AI gubbins.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 7 hours 22 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

Such powerful gaming laptops as the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate haven’t tended to do particularly well with battery life, given how hungry their components can be. To try and alleviate this somewhat, Medion has put a 99.9Whr battery inside.

In the PCMark 10 battery test with the brightness at 150 nits, and with the keyboard’s RGB backlighting off, but with the laptop’s front underglow still on, it managed to last for a surprisingly long 7 hours and 22 minutes. That’s very long for a laptop of this spec, where the ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D lasted for an hour or so shorter, and means you’ll be able to get nearly a full working day away from the mains.

In spite of the 420W power adapter this laptop comes with, charging speeds were on the slower side, taking 63 minutes to get to 50%, while a full charge took 145 minutes. That is quite disappointing, as laptops with much less powerful bricks and slightly smaller capacities can charge in half the time.

Should you buy it?

FAQs