RTX 4090, Core i9 and water cooling – in a laptop worth 4500 euros

By admin On Feb 7, 2023

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The X40 is a very fast laptop, equipped with an RTX 4090 video card and a Core i9 13900HX processor. The laptop is distinguished by the possibility of an external water cooler. It actually only provides speed gains in games, about eight percent at the highest settings. In addition, the fans in the laptop don’t have to run as fast, which means less noise. The hardware is easy to upgrade. The screen has a 240Hz refresh rate, but just falls short of the corresponding response times. You have to arrange coolant for the water cooler yourself and given the additional cost of 250 euros, that should have been included.

Pros

Bizarrely fast
Mechanical keys
Accessible hardware
Water cooler offers speed and quiet

Cons

Response times could be better
Water cooler is supplied without coolant
Couplings can leak if they are skewed

Intel’s Raptor Lake generation processors have been available on desktops since the fall of 2022, as well as Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti, 4080, and 4090 video cards. Now you can get that hardware in laptops too. The first laptop we test with it may well be superlative. The Medion Erazer Beast X40 is equipped with a Core i9-13900HX processor with 24 cores and a mobile RTX 4090 video card. To keep that hardware running at its best, you can also connect an optional water cooler. We discuss that laptop and the water cooler in this review.

Medion Erazer Beast X40

The laptop in question is fully called Medion Erazer Beast X40. It’s a 17″ laptop, which looks pretty svelte considering the potent hardware it houses. If the case looks familiar to you, it could be, because Medion buys the barebones from Uniwill, which is Tongfang’s new name That manufacturer has built a laptop with a tidy look and fairly thin screen edges.The top screen edge contains a 1080p camera with support for facial recognition.The speakers are placed on the bottom of the housing and can produce quite a bit of volume, but sound very shrill.

When you hold the laptop, it feels sturdy. The housing is partly made of plastic, but not the hard kind that feels cheap; it has a somewhat ‘rubbery’ feel to it. The back of the screen and the bottom are made of metal. What is also striking is that the X40 has a very large trackpad, which is somewhat reminiscent of that of an Apple MacBook Pro. There’s also thought behind the large trackpad. On laptops with a numeric keypad, such as the X40, manufacturers often find it difficult to choose where to place the touchpad. If you place it in the middle of the alphanumeric part of the keyboard, the touchpad is not in the middle of the housing.And if you place it in the middle of the housing, the center of your touchpad will be at the height of the right control key.

The solution is this large touchpad, which is located in the middle of the laptop, but where you can switch off the right half. You do this by double-tapping the dot at the top right of the touchpad. If you do that, you can only use the left half of the touchpad, which is neatly located in the middle below the alphanumeric part of the keyboard. If you want to switch off the touchpad completely, for example because you are gaming, tap the dot in the top left corner twice. Is the location of the touchpad an insurmountable problem? We can’t imagine that, but the beauty of this solution is that it is nice and big and that works well if you use a lot of gestures with more than one finger.

Above the touchpad is of course the keyboard and there is something special about that too. It contains mechanical switches from Cherry. Cherry MX Ultra Low Profile Tactile Switches, to be exact. The switches have a travel of 1.8mm, which is quite a lot for a laptop keyboard, and a force of 65cN. The gif above nicely shows how the key works. Membrane keyboards do give a much clearer key feel than mechanical ones and also sound a bit noisier, but they are not ‘clicky’, like blue Cherry switches, for example. Unfortunately, not all keys on the X40 keyboard are mechanical. The top row of keys and the numeric keypad simply use membrane switches.

You will find the connections on the left, right and at the back of the laptop. The latter is nice if you often have the laptop in the same place, because the cables for your peripherals won’t get in the way to the left or right of your laptop. On the back is the HDMI 2.1 connection, with 2.5 Gbit/s Ethernet and a USB-C connection with support for Thunderbolt 4. The two holes next to each other are for the hoses for the water cooling.

There seems to be another USB-C connection on the left, but that is the place to mount a lock. There is also a 10Gbit/s USB-A connector and the jack connections. On the right are two more USB 5Gbit/s connections and a card reader.

The watercooler

What makes the Erazer X40 unique is the external water cooling. Water cooling on a laptop is uncommon, but not unique. Back in 2016, we reviewed the ASUS GX700 with an external water cooler and the funny thing is that the approach to the cooling system is very different now. The basics are the same; a kind of water-filled heat pipe runs over the normal heat pipes of the cooling. The philosophy behind the cooling system of the GX700 is similar to that of the all-in-one water cooler you know from desktops; it is a maintenance-free system.

That is different with the X40. The water cooler is also made by Uniwill and the system is much more like ‘build your own’ water cooling. The system costs 250 euros and for that money, you don’t get any coolant; you have to buy it yourself. Medion recommends using regular demineralized water. Connecting the water cooling is in principle very simple. The water hoses snap magnetically to the laptop and water cooler. When they are locked in place, you can wiggle them up and down a bit, but that should not cause any leaks. Even if you accidentally disconnect a hose, because you may have picked up the laptop and forgot that it still had a water cooler attached, there is no need to worry.The couplings seal themselves when they are loose and more than a few drops of water will not escape.

Still, it remains to be careful, because it is possible that the hoses are not completely straight, but the couplings do remain open, we noticed while photographing the laptop. We had put the system in different positions and unnoticed the coupling had become crooked, leaving the laptop in a puddle of water.

The water cooler does not have a separate power supply. Instead, you plug the laptop’s power supply into the external cooler and loop it through to the laptop itself. Communication with the water cooler is via Bluetooth and Medions control center software. There you can set the colors in which the fan flashes and how fast the fan runs.

For people who aren’t interested in tweaking hardware, the water cooler might be intimidating, but those users probably aren’t the target audience either. As far as we are concerned, the ‘open character’ of the water cooler is actually an advantage. You can easily top up cooling water if necessary and you can also easily open the water cooler itself, for example to mount another fan. Finally, the cooler is also compact; you don’t need a roller case to take it with you.

CPU: 13900HX = 13900K

When Intel announced its thirteenth-generation Core laptop processors, the chipmaker came up with four different categories, identified by a one- or two-letter suffix. ‘U’ belongs to the 15W chips, ‘P’ to 28W, ‘H’ to the 45W CPUs, and ‘HX’ to the fastest 55 watts. That was not the first time, with the twelfth generation Intel already had HX chips, but we hardly saw them in laptops in practice. With the thirteenth generation it must be different, because during CESAlienware, ASUS, Razer and Lenovo all announced laptops with the HX laptop processors. Although, laptop processors?

The HX chips are actually not laptop, but desktop processors. The overviews above sum it up nicely. The H, P, and U processors, on the right image, are ‘real’ laptop processors. The emphasis there is more on energy efficiency. For example, the cpu and pch are on the same package and there is support for economical Lpddr4 or Lpddr5 memory. You don’t need more than two SATA connections and you probably won’t saturate more than eight PCIe gen5 lanes. It stops at a maximum of six P-cores, but there is a relatively powerful Iris Xe GPU. Oh yes, and Thunderbolt of course.

So the HX chips are desktop chips that focus on speed and not efficiency. To begin with, the cpu and pch are separate chips and there is no support for Lpddr memory, which you do not encounter at all in desktops. You have access to more SATA and USB connections than you will ever find in a laptop, as well as up to eight P-cores and 16 PCIe gen5 lanes. The integrated GPU is not much, but these types of chips will always be accompanied by a smooth video card.

The Medion X40 is equipped with a Core i9-13900HX, which is almost the same processor as a 13900K, but at lower clock speeds. Both chips have eight P-cores and sixteen E-cores, 36MB total cache memory, and they both support DDR4 memory at 3200MT/s or DDR5 at 5600MT/s. Although the integrated GPUs have a different name, they both have 32 execution units and even the maximum clock speed is the same. The 13900K has base power of 125W and a maximum turbo power of 253W. That is lower with the 13900HX, which has a base power of 55W and a maximum turbo of 157W. The maximum clock frequency of the mobile chip is therefore not 5.8, but 5.4 GHz and the E-cores do not 4.3, but 3.9 GHz. However, it should be clear that the HX chips are made for only one thing: speed. Efficiency is secondary.

GPU: RTX 4090, or is it a 4080?

During CES in early January, Nvidia presented its new mobile video cards. Just like the desktop video cards, the chips are based on the 4nm Ada Lovelace architecture. This means that the laptop chips have the same newly introduced functionality as the desktop video cards. The RTX 40 laptop cards will therefore also have access to the third-generation RT cores, DLSS3 and AV1 encoding.

Specifically for laptop video cards, Nvidia has made a number of tweaks, which the company classifies under the Max-Q brand name. With the first generations of Max-Q video cards, there were still laptop GPUs that may or may not have Max Q support. If you did have a Max-Q video card, it was more economical, but also slower than a non-Max Q video card. That has now changed. We’ve already arrived at the fifth generation and all laptop video cards from Nvidia use ‘Max Q techniques’.

The fifth-generation Max-Q focuses on making memory more efficient. This is the case with the cache and the working memory. More efficient chips are used for this and the clock speed is reduced faster if possible.

4090 = 4080

Laptop video cards are usually not comparable to desktop video cards in terms of naming. The fastest laptop video card at the moment is called RTX 4090, but from a hardware point of view it is the same GPU as on an RTX 4080 desktop card. The mobile GPU is clocked lower to keep consumption within limits. The consumption is a maximum of 150W and a maximum of 25W dynamic boost can be added, if the temperatures allow it. Nevertheless, the clock speed is a lot lower than with a desktop 4080, because it can consume 320W. The working memory of the mobile RTX 4090 is simply GDDR6, instead of GDDR6x. Plain GDDR6 runs at lower clock frequencies, resulting in lower power consumption, but also lower bandwidth.

	RTX 4090 laptop	RTX 4080 laptop	RTX 4080 desktop
CUDA cores	9728	7424	9728
Tensor cores	304	232	304
Ray tracing cores	76	58	76
Clock Speed (MHz)	1455-2040	1350-2280	2210-2510
Power (W)	80-150	60-150	320
Random access memory	16GB GDDR6	12GB DDR6	16GB GDDR6x
Memory bus	256bit	192bit	256bit
Memory bandwidth	576GB/s	384GB/s	717GB/s

The RTX 4090 that is in the Medion X40 has a tgp of 150W, plus 25W dynamic boost , for a total of 175W. The tgp is an important value, because in theory, as a laptop builder, you can also configure an RTX 4090 at 80W, with lower performance as a result. At the beginning of 2021, the difference in TGP caused a stir due to the lack of clarity about TGPs. Manufacturers have since become clearer about this and are now using the TGPs as part of their marketing. Almost all gaming laptops announced at CES use the maximum tgp of the chip.

Specifications and CPU benchmarks

Medion sells the Erazer in the configuration below, equipped with the new Intel 13900HX processor and Nvidia RTX 4090 video card. This version costs 4500 euros and Medion will also supply a variant with RTX 4080 video card, 1TB storage and 16GB of RAM for 3500 euros.

	Medion Erazer X40
Processor	Intel Core i9-13900HX
cores/threads	24 (8P+16E) 32 threads
max. clock frequency	5.4GHz (P cores) 3.9GHz (E cores)
GPU	Nvidia RTX 4090 (175W tgp)
Random access memory	32GB DDR5-4800
SSD	2x 1TB Phison B47R
Ethernet	Realtek gaming 2.5 Gbit/s
Wi-Fi	Intel WiFi 6E AX211 160MHz
Screen	17″, 2560×1600 pixels, 240Hz, matte
Panel	BOE NE170QDM-NZ1
Battery	99.8Wh
Operating system	Windows 11

The X40 features some of the fastest hardware you can get right now. A slightly higher clocked version of the Core i9-13900HX is available, the 13980HX, but it has the same number of cores. The RTX 4090 is the fastest video card Nvidia can deliver and in this case the card is tuned for the maximum power of 175W.

If the 32GB RAM or the two 1TB SSDs are not enough for you, you can upgrade that hardware afterward. The bottom plate is easy to remove from the laptop, giving you easy access to the hardware.

Benchmarking

The i9-13900HX is, as you could read earlier in this review, really just a desktop processor. When we run Cinebench, the power consumption of the cpu package shoots up to – this is not a joke – 160W.

This makes the 13900HX one and a half times as fast as a 12900H. Funnily enough, it doesn’t matter if you only connect the water cooling to the CPU when working. The scores in Cinebench and in the other benchmarks below are equally high.

In Geekbench, the i9-13900HX is not one and a half times as fast as the 12900H, but it is still a lot faster than the laptops of the previous generation that we tested. Cooling on air or water makes no difference here either.

PCMark 10 covers several tasks, with Essentials being the simplest. This involves launching applications, web browsing and video calling. In that scenario, the fast hardware in the X40 makes no difference. The Productivity scenario involves word processing and spreadsheets. With Digital Content Creation, the hardware is getting a bit more difficult and with gaming the CPU and GPU are heavily loaded and you can clearly see that the i9 processor and RTX 4090 make the difference.

DaVinci Resolve doesn’t scale as nicely as Cinebench, but the new i9 chip is still half a minute faster at this task than the ASUS Scar 17 with i9-12900H.

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950tijd in seconden (lager is beter)9101112131415161718192021ASUS ROG Strix Scar 17 G733Z-LL093WCorsair Voyager a1600Medion Erazer Beast X40 (lucht)Medion Erazer Beast X40 (water)

The benchmarks on this page show that the water cooler adds little. Blender creates a considerable CPU load and then you see that it matters something, but not much. The real profit is achieved in games that we have tested on the next page.

Game Benchmarks

As it turned out a few pages back , the mobile RTX 4090 cannot be compared to the desktop 4090. The mobile RTX 4090 is more of an RTX 4080 in terms of chip, with less memory bandwidth and of course a lower clock speed due to the lower consumption. If you want to compare the performance to that of a desktop video card, it comes close to an RTX 4070 Ti. That may sound disappointing, but for a laptop video card that is very fast.

In 3DMark Time Spy Graphics, the RTX 4090 is nearly twice as fast as the 3080 Ti in the Alienware x17, the fastest gaming laptop we’ve tested to date. You won’t get a doubling in practice, but the 4090 is considerably faster than the video cards of the previous generation.

In Fire Strike, which still uses the DirectX 11 API, the difference is much less than with Time Spy. In both the CPU and GPU test, the Medion is well at the top.

Next we test Total War: Troy. It is nice to see that the Core i9-13900HX holds its own, because at 1920×1080 resolution and medium settings, the frame rate is mainly limited by the processor. The water cooling only makes a difference if we run the benchmark at 4k resolution.

F1 2020 has been around for a while and is also a game that mainly relies on the processor, especially at low resolution. At 4k and ultra settings, the Medion is almost twice as fast as the Alienware x17.

In Metro: Exodus, the video card really has to sweat and the water cooling provides a boost of about eight percent.

Finally, in Far Cry: New Dawn we again see that the Medion X40 performs well compared to the older laptops. The differences are not as big as with the three previous games. It seems that the game engine is the limiting factor here.

Image quality and response times

The X40 is equipped with a 17″ screen with a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels and a refresh rate of 240Hz. The panel comes from BOE and specifically the type number NE170QDM-NZ1. It is a panel with a matte finish and a high refresh rate. can you see it’s meant for gaming laptops How good is that panel We check it using a colorimeter and CalMAN software.

To start with, we look at the brightness, which is nice and high at 400cd/m². If we look at the contrast, we see something peculiar. A ratio of 340:1 is very disappointing for an IPS-like panel. Other reviewers, who tested another laptop with the same panel, also come out a bit higher, around 900:1. We would consider that ‘okay’ for this type. It is not the case that the representation of the image is ‘unsightly’. You may not even notice it when you’re used to this screen, but if you put another screen next to it, the difference quickly becomes clear. We have been in contact with Medion about the disappointing contrast and in a copy that they tested themselves, the contrast came out at 943:1. So it seems that there is something wrong with our copy, but that you normally end up higher.

The contrast is therefore disappointing and you can also say that about the calibration. There is too much red and green and too little blue in the color balance. The connoisseurs will notice this faster than someone who only uses the laptop for games, because the deviation is the same for almost all shades of gray. The screen can display the full sRGB gamut, but for 4500 euros that is also the least you can expect.

With gaming laptops, assessing the image quality is always difficult. If you only use the laptop for games, a high screen brightness and especially fast response times, more about which below, are of the utmost importance. Whether or not a certain color tone is displayed correctly or not is not that important. On the other hand, this is a laptop of 4500 euros and the fast hardware also lends itself to other uses, such as editing photos and videos, where calibration is important. Seen from that point of view, the screen of the X40 is disappointing and it is better to connect an external monitor.

Response times

Important for gamers are fast response times of screens. The screen refreshes at 240Hz, but can it also switch that quickly? Using an oscilloscope, we look at the response times of the screen in two scenarios: from white to black and from twenty percent gray to eighty percent gray.

A refresh rate of 240Hz means that the screen must be able to show a new image every 4.17ms. If that doesn’t work, you will suffer from ghosting. The panel in the X40 does a nice job. In all tests it is just above 4.17ms, but it doesn’t make much difference. The Corsair A1600 shows that things could be worse.

Noise production and battery life

The external water cooler ensures that the hardware can run faster, but the extra cooling has a second advantage; as a result, the fans in the laptop don’t have to run as fast. There is noise from the pump and the fan in the water cooler, but in total that makes noticeably less noise than the laptop without water cooling.

Of course, we want to quantify that feeling and we do that with the help of a Larson Davis 831C sound level meter with a 378A04 microphone that is equipped with a preamplifier. The microphone has one noise floor of 5.5dB(A). Due to unavoidable ambient noise, the noise floor of our low-noise room is approximately 12dB(A). Taking a safe margin, we can perform consistent measurements from 14dB(A). We measure the sound pressure at a distance of 50cm, at an angle of 45°. We did two tests and in the test with the water cooler the setup is as shown in the photo above. We do the testing in four scenarios: WebXPRT simulates web browsing, PCMark 10 is representative of heavier desktop use and Blender is a heavy multithreaded workload for the CPU. We use F1 2020 to test games. We measure the sound pressure over the period of each test and express the result in an average, LAeq, in dB.

If the load is not too great, such as with WebXPRT, which we use to simulate web browsing, then the set-up with water cooler is remarkably noisy. The noise of the pump and fan ensures that the total sound pressure is higher than if you only used the internal fans. If the load increases further, as with Blender, or if you start gaming, as we do with F1 2020, the difference is significant and the cooling for a gaming laptop is relatively quiet. If you like silence, you should only connect the water cooling if you are going to put a lot of strain on the hardware.

Battery life

The Erazer X40 has the largest battery you’ll find in a laptop: 99Wh. Bigger than that and you can’t take it on the plane. That capacity is also necessary, because energy consumption has not been taken into account at any point in this laptop. The processor actually comes from a desktop, it has a 240Hz screen and (fortunately) no economical Lpddr memory has been chosen. So you can forget about a long battery life in advance.

In the browsing test we end up with just over three hours, and if you give the hardware a good beating, as we simulate with PCMark, you’ll have an hour or two left. Well, that’s not much and actually not really surprising. This is clearly not a laptop for the road.

Conclusion

The Medion Erazer Beast X40 is easily the fastest laptop we’ve tested so far. The new Intel processor and Nvidia video card are really next-level and you can use the water cooler to take it up a notch.

Let’s start with the processor. The HX chip, as we mentioned, is basically a desktop chip in a laptop. That means speed, but also little efficiency and that is reflected in the battery life. That does not matter; We don’t think a long battery life is important with a gaming laptop. The performance is, and it is impressive. Especially if you have software that can utilize all 24 cores. If you succeed, you can be one and a half times faster than with a previous generation i9-12900H.

The RTX 4090 also offers impressive performance. Although it is not the same GPU as on the desktop, this mobile RTX 4090 performs at 4k ultra up to about seventy percent better than the fastest GPU of the previous generation, the RTX 3080 Ti, at 4k resolution and ultra settings.

To make the already fast hardware run even faster, you can also buy the water cooler for 250 euros. It is a pity that you have to buy the coolant separately, but then you can squeeze even more speed out of your hardware. This mainly applies to games, because if you only run heavy software on the CPU, the water cooling makes no difference. Even with games, a difference is not always visible; that only occurs at the highest settings at a high resolution. Do you have to spend 250 euros for the approximately eight percent frame rate gain? On the one hand, that few percent will not make a world of difference, but on the other hand, 250 euros is doable given the price of the laptop itself.

Well, the price: 4500 euros. That’s a lot of money and we suspect that competing laptops with RTX 4090 and Core i9 processors won’t be much cheaper. This is therefore not a laptop for users who want great value for money, but one for people who want the fastest laptop of the moment.