Medion Erazer X6811 review

If you want a properly powerful gaming laptop, you’ll usually end up paying through the nose for it. Even at a whopping £950, Medion’s Erazer X6811 is comparatively cheap for a gaming laptop; and certainly inexpensive given its specification. There’s plenty of graphical musicale here; thanks to the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M chipset. This comes with a slightly ludicrous 1.5GB of dedicated GDDR5 graphics memory, more than the vast majority of desktop cards.

In our standard laptop gaming test, carried out using Call of Duty 4 running at 1,280×720 with 4xAA, it achieved a massive 62.8fps. We did further tests with it connected it to a 24in 1,920×1,080 widescreen monitor. At this resolution our test produced a frame rate of 40.1fps – still very impressive. We ran Crysis using our usual desktop PC test settings and got 24.9fps; that’s close to being playable, and runs smoothly if you either drop the resolution or reduce anti-aliasing to 2x.

The rest of the X6811’s specification hasn’t been compromised to make room for the graphics chipset. A 2.53GHz Intel Core i5-460M processor produced a decent overall score of 94 in our application benchmarks – this isn’t the most powerful computer around, but we can’t think of much that you wouldn’t be able to do with it. It has 4GB of DDR3 memory and a 640GB hard disk. You can output 5.1 surround sound via either its analogue stereo outputs or using an optical S/PDIF, plus the built-in speakers have surprisingly decent bass and directionality, doing a fair job with most music, movies and games.

The laptop’s 15.6in screen is small by gaming laptop standards, and can only handle a maximum resolution of 1,366×768. This may not be much, but you’d hard pushed to run the latest games at higher resolutions with all the graphics options enabled. We liked the matt LCD finish, which doesn’t suffer from the distracting reflections common to the glossy screens that most laptops use. Brightness was even and colours looked natural, with accurate white tones.

With gaming sessions often running well into the wee hours, you’ll need a comfortable keyboard. There’s a full keyboard, complete with number pad and cursor keys. The flat, widely spaced keys are comfortable to type on, although their slightly crowded positioning made it easy to mis-key until we got used to the layout. There’s plenty of space on the wrist rests, too.

Our least favourite part of the laptop is the touchpad, which has an unpleasantly rough texture that made it harder to make sensitive movements. Gamers will almost certainly use a mouse, which means this isn’t a big problem unless you plan on working on the move. At 3.5kg, the Erazer isn’t best suited for such a role. That said, and despite its power-hungry GPU, the battery lasted for a respectable four hours in our light usage test. Playing games on battery power will reduce this to around an hour and-a-half.

The X6811 is more understated than most laptops aimed at the gaming market, but it’s still heavy and none too attractive. If you don’t specifically need the graphics processing power, there are better all-round options at this price – such as the Acer Aspire Ethos 8943G with its Blu-ray drive and 1080p display. In the end, its mobile gaming performance justifies the X6811’s price, and despite the smallish display, this is the gaming laptop to buy for under a grand.