Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate (RTX 5090) Review

Design and Keyboard

• Premium, classy looks
• Excellent selection of ports
• Reliable, tactile keyboard

The Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate looks and feels excellent, with a smart and classy look and feel thanks to its entirely metal frame. There isn’t much in the way of the traditional gamer flair here, apart from an illuminated Medion logo on the lid and a small overhang on the back where all the cooling ducting and mesh live.

A 2.8kg weight puts this on the heftier side, although that isn’t entirely unreasonable for a laptop with the voluminous amount of power on offer. A 30mm thickness is double, or even triple, a lot of sleek modern ultrabooks, but it needs to be for accommodating all of the necessary components inside, and for allowing this laptop to have such a good port selection. 

The ports on the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate are present on the left, right and rear sides, as is typical with modern gaming laptops. The left side has a USB-A, USB-C and a headphone jack clustered together, with a 2.5-Gig Ethernet port for speedy wired networking.

As well as this, the right side gives you a full-size SD card reader and a further two USB-As, while the rear has the DC-in port for power from the included 420W brick, an HDMI 2.1 port, another USB-C and a Mini DisplayPort 2.1a port.

The keyboard here is a full-size layout with arrow keys, a number pad and such, and is a reasonably snappy membrane choice that’s quite positive in its feel. It is also fully RGB-backlit for added flashiness, while there is a light bar across the front of the laptop.

Both are addressable in software, which is handy. The Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate’s trackpad is of a reasonable size, and feels smooth and especially responsive under-finger.

Display and Speakers

• Punchy screen with deep blacks and fantastic contrast
• Excellent colour accuracy 
• Surprisingly decent speakers

The display with this RTX 5090 model isn’t any different to that of the RTX 5080 version of this laptop, with a large 16-inch Mini LED-backlit 2560×1600 resolution option with a rather high 300Hz refresh rate.

This arguably allows the internal components to stretch their legs a little more on a screen that’s otherwise a fantastic candidate for intensive, detailed gaming.

As much as it has the same specs as of the RTX 5080 variant, it performs markedly differently in my testing, and more akin to what we’d expect from a high-end Mini LED display. This is evident with its 774.9 nits of peak SDR brightness that gives images some real punch, while there is support for up to 1000 nits for highlights in supported content with this screen’s HDR1000 certification.

In addition, its 0.03 black level that I measured gives us deep, inky blacks and its 28130:1 contrast gives images some real dynamic range and contrast that is only matched by OLED screens.

This is a colour-accurate screen for generalist productivity tasks and for more colour-sensitive tasks, as is evidenced by the 100% sRGB coverage, as well as the 98% DCI-P3 and 87% Adobe RGB results.

While the display was oddly different on the RTX 5080 model, the speakers aren’t different here.  This means the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate has a set that has good volume and body, and a decent amount of bass, which is more than up to general working and some workloads for gaming, too.

Performance

• Immense performance from Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5090
• Lots of graphical horsepower, even at higher resolutions and with ray-tracing
• Speedy and capacious SSD with good quantity of DDR5 RAM

The big thing with this top variant of the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate is the presence of Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 laptop GPU alongside the second-in-command Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor to make for an almighty core of laptop componentry. 

The Core Ultra 9 275HX features 24 cores (split between 8 Performance and 16 Efficiency Cores) and 24 threads, which allows it to make for a rather potent chip in our testing in both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23. Single core performance is some of the strongest I’ve seen with this chip outside of the very best MacBooks, while its multi-core performance is commendable, even if Intel decided to do away with hyperthreading on this chip.

In addition, with the RTX 5090, its results in games and in 3DMark Time Spy are some of the highest we’ve ever seen for a gaming laptop. Over the RTX 5080 variant, and the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D with a laptop-class 4090 inside, some results are more than just incremental increases, while others aren’t too much different.

1080p performance is remarkably strong, with some immense results in Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal with 142.04fps and 148fps respectively. Playing eSports titles such as Rainbow Six Extraction also allow you to get close to the top 300Hz refresh rate with a 247fps average.

Going up to 1440p also didn’t seem to slow the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate down much with Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal hitting averages of 99.36fps and 112fps, albeit without any ray-tracing or upscaling applied. Rainbow Six Extraction remained high at 170fps, although with a result that’s only one frame per second better than the 5080 version of this laptop.

Adding in ray-tracing at the Ultra preset to the mix at 1080p posted a 62.98fps average in Cyberpunk 2077, while at this laptop’s native resolution of 2560×1600, it was 40.20fps. The new DLSS Transformer model pushed these results up to 88.95fps and 66.18fps, respectively, with a much stronger performance thanks to the powers of DLSS4 and the new Transformer model that does a better job of preserving detail and removing unwanted artefacts against the older CNN version.

Being a 50-series laptop means this Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate can benefit from Nvidia’s clever multi-frame-gen tech with the 5090 that’s present. With this, it adds up to three ‘fake frames’ for every ‘real’ frame rendered to increase your FPS to play well with high-refresh rate screens. The results are reliant upon there being a high enough base frame rate to prevent displayed images being choppy or there being horrible latency.

For ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 at this laptop’s native 2560×1600 resolution and with DLSS Transformer applied, it was able to get up to 213fps, while at 1080p, it went as high as 284.49fps. That’s mightily impressive.

While doing this, this laptop didn’t necessarily feel as if it was getting too hot, while the fans weren’t spinning to the point the Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate sounded like an aeroplane preparing for take-off. Sure, you could hear the fans were working, but it wasn’t too distracting.

This Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate comes with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a capacious 2TB SSD in this spec that’s also rather zippy, thanks to read speeds of 9748.52 MB/s and write speeds of 7822.62 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 for it, only coming with McAfee antivirus built-in as some additional third-party software.

There is 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 6 hours 55 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

The Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate features a large 99.9Whr battery to help provide some solid endurance to a laptop packed with some rather power hungry components, and to help alleviate the longstanding issue of them not lasting very long under load.

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, this RTX 5090 variant lasted for five minutes shy of seven hours, which is an excellent showing for a laptop this powerful.

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 large 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 152 minutes. That is rather disappointing, as laptops with much less powerful bricks and slightly smaller capacities can charge in half the time.

Should you buy it?