Medion Akoya E15303 review

Two-minute review

An affordable laptop with plenty of processing power and a modicum of portability, that’s what the Medion Akoya E15303 promises. Granted, the branding isn’t exactly inspirational. Nor is the anonymous chassis design. But if the features and performance are there, well, that’s surely what matters.

This version of Medion’s 15.4-inch portable rolls with AMD power. You can snag one with a six-core AMD Ryzen 5 CPUn for under £500, which is impressive enough. But this eight-core beast rocks in at around £580. That’s remarkably affordable for such a powerful machine.

Elsewhere, you get 8GB of DDR4 memory, which is enough for mainstream multitasking, and fully 512GB of solid-state storage. Again, that’s a promising all-round feature set at this price level. Then there’s the screen. It’s a 15.4-inch IPS panel with 1080p resolution or 1,920 by 1,080 pixels and sports IPS technology for superior colours and viewing angles.

So far, so good, right? Indeed. From here, however, things get a little patchier. The port selection, for instance, is limited to a single USB-A socket in mere 2.0 spec, a lone USB-C 3.2 connector, an HDMI interface and a microSD reader. The battery, meanwhile, is a fairly modest 45Wh item.

As for real-world performance, the eight-core AMD CPU provides excellent performance at this price point. It really is a lot of number-crunching grunt for the money. There are limitations, of course. The integrated AMD GPU is only good enough for the very lightest of gaming. Likewise, the 512GB SSD is SATA spec rather than PCIe, so storage performance is fairly poor by today’s standards.

But the biggest issue is the Medion Akoya E15303’s 15.4-inch display. On paper, the 1080p resolution and IPS technology is all good. But a conspicuously weak backlight makes for a disappointing experience. Even indoors, it looks dim and dingy. Outdoors, forget it. It’s a pity because the colours, viewing angles and response are fine.

The battery life of around four and a half hours of video playback is no great shakes, either. All-day battery life isn’t a realistic expectation on such an affordable machine. But we’d be happier with nearer six hours.

All of which means the Medion Akoya E15303 remains a mostly impressive package for the money. You get a great CPU, enough memory for mainstream multitasking and plenty of storage, all in a reasonably portable and robust package. But if you want a great viewing experience and good battery life, you’ll need to look elsewhere. And very probably pay more.

Price and availability

At £580 (around $599, AU$800 - currently, there is no availability in the US or Australia but an equally aggressive price is likely as and when in those territories), the Medion Akoya E15303 delivers a serious on-paper bang for your buck. With a powerful eight-core CPU and plenty of memory and storage, plus a 1080p IPS panel, there are no obvious spec-list omissions. That said, more expensive systems have larger batteries and slicker styling. The connectivity options are likewise a little limited. 

Direct comparisons are always tricky, but by way of example, the Lenovo ThinkBook 15 G2 has the same CPU and SSD size, plus a 1080p 15.4-inch screen, albeit with 16GB rather than 8GB of RAM but costs over £900. Meanwhile, the Acer Aspire 5 A515-44 matches the Medion spec for spec but lists for around £650. However you slice it, then, the Medion Akoya E15303 makes for a very compelling value proposition. That isn’t to say this laptop is without flaws. At this price point, compromises must be made. But in at least some important regards, it’s a very powerful machine for the money.

Design

The Medion Akoya E15303 isn’t going to win any awards for design panache or originality. Functionally, however, it gets the job done. 

The chassis is plastic with an aluminium rear cover for the screen and it all feels stiff and robust, while the keyboard (which is backlit) is stable and only suffers from a tiny bit of bounce if you really hammer away at it.

Fairly slim bezels on three out of four sides of the IPS screen, meanwhile, ensure that the Medion Akoya E15303 is reasonably compact for a 15.4-inch model. Speaking of which, it’s therefore impressive to see a full number pad squeezed in alongside the QWERTY keyboard. Nice.

At 2cm thick and weighing in at 1.74kg or 3.8lb, it’s a reasonably thin, light and portable system, especially considering the price and CPU power. That’s one advantage of having a fairly modest battery - smaller batteries are much lighter. The Medion Akoya E15303’s power supply is also very small and light. So, it’s plausible to use this laptop as a daily driver, carrying it into work or classes regularly.

One area that’s a little weaker is port and connectivity. Strictly speaking, the Medion Akoya E15303 has all the basic computing needs covered. It has both USB-A and USB-C sockets, for instance. The snag is that there’s only one of each and the USB-A port is in lowly 2.0 spec. In other words, there is only one high-speed port.

That said, the USB-C port doubles as a DisplayPort video connector. Add in the full-size HDMI port and you have good support for external displays. As for memory cards, there’s a microSD card reader but no full-size SD card reader, which would be much more useful. As for other extras and frills, Amazon Alexa support is integrated and the HD webcam has a hardware privacy switch, which is nice for peace of mind.

Performance

The single most impressive aspect of the Medion Akoya E15303 is CPU performance. That you can have eight high-performance AMD CPU cores in such an affordable laptop is simply fantastic.

OK, the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U doesn’t have AMD’s latest Zen 3 cores. It’s a Zen 2-based chip. And multi-threading or SMT has been disabled, so it only supports eight software threads in parallel. For multi-threaded wordloads, the otherwise similar 4800U chip improves performance by as much as 40% by dint of having SMT enabled. But it’s still a pretty performant CPU and great for things like video editing on the move.

If there is a qualification to that, it’s single-core performance, which is adequate but not spectacular. The 8GB of DDR4 system memory is also decent. It’s enough for mainstream multitasking, albeit power users will appreciate 16GB or more. But, again, 16GB-plus is not a realistic expectation at this price point.

On the storage side of the equation, the Medion Akoya E15303 runs a Phison SATA SSD with around 500MB/s sequential read and write performance, plus 35MB/s 4K read and 95MB/s 4K writes. It’s a pretty old-school drive and not nearly as fast as the latest PCIe SSDs. It’s one fairly obvious area where money has been saved. There is an additional M.2 SSD expansion slot. But it, too, is limited to SATA rather than PCIe operation.

The 15.4-inch display is also an area where savings have been made. It’s a 1080p IPS panel, which sounds fine. But the backlight is very weak - weak enough, in fact, to be problematic indoors. It’s just so dim and dingy you find yourself constantly trying to increase the brightness only to find it’s already maxed out. Outdoors? Don’t even try it. In other regards it’s a nice enough panel with good colours, viewing angles and response.

Battery life

At this price point, a really big battery wasn’t ever going to be on the menu. The specification of the Medion Akoya E15303’s medium-sized 45Wh lithium pack is therefore reasonable. But the actual performance is a little disappointing.

In our movie playback test, it runs out of puff in under four and a half hours. Given that one of the stand out  features of AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 7 4700U processor is energy efficiency, that’s not a great result. Again, the aggressive price point of the Medion Akoya E15303 means all-day battery life is unrealistic. But we’d be much happier with something around six hours of video playback.

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