Medion Erazer X5361 G review: A powerful gaming PC for a reasonable price

The Medion Erazer X5361 G is a desktop PC that provides huge graphics performance at a low price. It has a quad-core, 3GHz Intel Core i5-7400 processor, as well as a distinctive chassis, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and an 8GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. In fact, the X5361 G is by far the cheapest GTX 1070 system we’ve seen.

This has come at the cost of some other things we’d have liked from a mid-range desktop. Instead of the ideal SSD and hard disk combination, you get only a single 2TB mechanical drive, with not even a small SSD cache. Capacity-wise, it’s great, but relying solely on a hard disk for Windows is a practice that’s best left behind at the budget level, and the Erazer X5361 G shows why. It’s painfully slow to boot, and even when it does, we found it necessary to wait a couple of minutes after reaching the desktop to actually try opening any applications – otherwise, that would take an age as well.

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Using the AS SSD storage benchmark, we measured sequential read speeds at 137MB/sec and write speeds at 139MB/sec. For data transfers, it’s not bad by hard disk standards, but for general Windows use the difference between this and an SSD is stark.

For £900, it’s also a little harder to be content with a Core i5-7400 than it was with the cheaper Erazer P4408 D. The higher 16GB of RAM helped in the multitasking portion of our 4K benchmarks, in which the Erazer X5361 G scored 100 (up from 91 on the P4408 D), but it scored 88 in the image test and 95 in the video test, for 97 overall. That’s lower than the Core i3-powered PC Specialist Enigma K6, and for an extra £100-£150, you could get something such as the Enigma X 01 or CCL Reaper, which scored 183 and 217 respectively.

Medion Erazer X5361 G review: Performance

The good news is that this chip doesn’t hold back the GTX 1070, which is, let’s not forget, what this PC is really about. Its gaming benchmark scores were on par with all other GTX 1070-based systems we’ve tested, which is to say that it’s a high-res powerhouse: in Dirt: Showdown with Ultra quality settings, it produced a luxurious 161fps at 1,920 x 1,080, 132fps at 2,560 x 1,440 and 75fps at 3,840 x 2,160.

Metro: Last Light Redux, too, was far from an insurmountable challenge: here, the Erazer X5361 G scored 73fps at 1,980 x 1,080 and 43fps at 2,560 x 1,440, both of which are more than smooth enough. At 4K, it dropped to a stuttery 19fps, though this was easily remedied by disabling SSAA, which is an essentially redundant tool at this resolution. Doing so produced an instant boost to 40fps, still with Very High quality, tessellations and PhysX effects enabled.

It can easily handle VR as well, judging by its run in the SteamVR Performance Test: it scored 10.8 out of a possible 11, showing that you won’t need to reduce any graphical quality settings to get high frame rates.

It’s better equipped than the P4408 D in terms of both external connectivity and internal upgrade potential, too. At the front, there are four USB ports (two USB 2, two USB 3), as well as an SD card reader and DVD-RW drive, while at the back there are two USB 2 ports, four US 3 ports and three 3.5mm audio jacks. A Gigabit Ethernet port handles wired connectivity (there’s no integrated Wi-Fi), and you get a healthy mix of audio outputs, including four DisplayPorts, two HDMI ports and one DVI-D socket.

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On the inside, there are no spare PCI-E x16 or RAM slots, which is a shame, but there is a spare PCI-E x1 slot. Three dual 2.5in/3.5in drive bays and an M.2 slot also mean you can add an SSD yourself in the future, or simply pack in extra hard disks. There’s also a pull-out, push-in 3.5in tray accessible from the front panel, which is useful if you want to quickly slip in a drive to get at its contents without wanting it to be a permanent fixture.

Medion Erazer X5361 G review: Verdict

While elements of the Medion Erazer X5361 G feel as though they belong in a much cheaper (or older) rig, this flaw is balanced out by how the graphics card feels as if it belongs in a much more expensive one. In this sense, it’s very much the next step up from the Erazer P4408 D: a PC you shouldn’t buy if you want a slick all-rounder, but which is absolutely worth it if you’re seeking maximum gaming power for as little cash as possible.