Medion Erazer P7651 review

The Medion Erazer P7651 is a large 17.3-inch screen gaming laptop you can find online for under £1000/€1000. Like other Medion laptops, hitting the right price is important.

Most of its features are solid. Its screen is ultra-bright and colourful, and while the GTX 1050 graphics card won’t satisfy the hardcore crowd, it’s powerful enough to handle recent games.

General use is held back by the 1TB hard drive, though. It’s just not fast enough to make Windows 10 run well. We miss an SSD, a lot.

Price and availability

The exact spec and price of the Medion Erazer P7651 varies by country. In Medion’s homeland of Germany, for example, you’ll find it for €1,399, with 16GB RAM, a 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD.

It’s a much more capable, but also more expensive, spec than we get in the UK. There you’ll find it sold for around £999.99 with a Core i7 CPU. It may squeeze in under an important price mark, but this version has just a 1TB hard drive for storage and 8GB RAM.

Design

The Medion Erazer P7651 is a plastic gaming laptop, with no aluminum on show to risk driving up the price. Its lid and the area around the keyboard have a soft-touch finish, though, putting a more finger-friendly layer on all that plastic.

This is also one of the less aggressive-looking gaming laptops around. There are no angular gouges on the back, which often look like a deconstructed “tribal” tattoo, and no LEDs around the case.

“Erazer” written across the lid still gives the game away, but the Medion Erazer P7651 has a low-key look. Some will find it a relief, others will call it boring.

Inside, blue outlining of the keys and trackpad separates the Medion Erazer P7651 from a generic black laptop. However, it’s hardly the equivalent of broadcasting your Steam library to everyone within line of sight.

At 28mm thick and 2.8kg, the Medion Erazer P7651 is also roughly the same size and weight as a normal 17-inch laptop.

While the all-plastic build won’t immediately impress your eyes or fingers, its solidity is fine. The lid flexes a little but the keyboard base is fairly stiff and the hinge is solid. It’s a cut above the Erazer P6681 in this respect, even if it does look plainer.

The laptop’s connections are a strangely wide-ranging mix of old and new, which should keep those of you with old gear lying about happy. In the 'blast from the past' category, the Medion Erazer P7651 has an optical drive on the right side and a VGA video socket on the left.

We could do without the DVD drive at this point, but there are probably plenty of people who still have monitors with VGA ports in their homes.

Two of the three full-size USB ports are USB 2.0 standard rather than 3.0 too. We’d prefer to flip that ratio around.

Stepping back into 2018, there’s a USB-C port and an RJ45 Ethernet socket, handy if your router is nearby or if you use a wired Powerline to solve Wi-Fi range issues. Around the front there’s an SD slot too.

Keyboard and trackpad

The Medion Erazer P7651 has a conventional keyboard, not one with an especially pronounced action, as found in some top-end gaming laptops. It looks just like the one used in the 15.6-inch Erazer P6681 but, perhaps thanks to more solid construction, it avoids the rattly effect we felt in that model.

It’s fine, in other words. And in a lesser-lit room the blue outlines do help to highlight the keys a little. However, there’s no keyboard backlight so you’ll have to get used to it before being able to play in the dark. If that’s your thing.

The textured plastic trackpad that sits below is a little small, perhaps under the assumption most will plug in a mouse. It uses integrated buttons too, not the gamer’s favourite style.

Using the pad for work, though, we found it perfectly serviceable. And using that word tells you how exciting it really is.

Screen

The Erazer P7651 has a large 17.3-inch IPS LCD with a matt finish. It’s a solid display all-round.

Its main drawback is that at an angle its blacks become blue-ish, a fairly common effect among matt LCDs.

Colours look punchy and vivid, though, covering 85% of the sRGB standard. And front-on contrast of 1120:1 is very solid. We’d be happy watching a movie on the Erazer P7651, and it could act as a TV-replacement for students.

Brightness is almost alarmingly good too, maxing-out at a searing 385cd/m. This isn’t a laptop we’d use outdoors much as it’s just too big and heavy, but it can cope with ambient light much better than many.