Medion Erazer X6813 review

Medion’s Erazer range has always focused on the high end, and this new X6813 is no exception. The silver metal-effect chassis, blue LED mood lighting and highlighted W, A, S, and D keys make it clear that gamers are the target market, but the powerful internal components and internal Blu-ray optical drive make it suitable for multimedia enthusiasts as well.

Performance comes from a quad-core Intel Core i7-2630QM running at 2GHz. This might not seem particularly high, but Turbo Boost can ramp this up to 2.9GHz across all four cores. Combined with 4GB of RAM, our multimedia benchmarks were hardly a challenge; an overall score of 80 makes this one of the fastest laptops you can buy at the moment. Windows boot times were also helped by the 80GB SSD, going from a hard boot to the desktop in just 23 seconds.

Unfortunately, this much power comes at the expense of battery life; an average three and a half hours in our light use test means you’ll have to carry the huge power supply with you if you take the laptop on the move. At 3.2kg without the PSU it’s more suited to a desk rather than mobile computing.

Unsurprisingly the Erazer has the grunt to back up those highlighted keys. Its Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M has 1.5GB of video memory, which helped it produce a stunning 77.9fps in our Dirt 3 test; it might be from the previous generation of mobile graphics cards, but it’s still easily capable of playing the latest titles. With this much power in reserve, it had no trouble playing Full HD video on the laptop, as well as on an external display using the HDMI output.