Medion Erazor P7647 review

As we've mentioned, the Medion Erazer P7647’s specifications mix some impressive new components with some compromises – namely the GTX 950M graphics card.

Last year the GTX 950M was seen in a lot more gaming laptops as the entry-level GPU, while this year we’re seeing a number of machines make use of the newer GTX 1050, GTX 1060, GTX 1070 and even (for very expensive machines) GTX 1080 graphics cards.

Including the GTX 950M has enabled Medion to keep the price of the Erazer P7647 relatively low, and despite its age it still comes with 4GB of graphics memory – that's a great deal more than gaming laptops came with a few years ago, and it means the Medion Erazer P7647 can handle games with higher-resolution textures and greater draw distances.

Games from a couple of years ago will mostly run pretty well on this GPU, but when it comes to newer, more graphically-ambitious titles, you will need to drop  the graphical settings to get a playable frame rate.

Things are helped by the Erazer P7647's 17.3-inch 1920 x 1080 screen, which doesn’t tax the GPU quite as much as higher-resolution monitors while still providing impressive image quality.

The Intel Core i7 7500U processor is much more impressive, a seventh-generation Kaby Lake offering that comes with two cores clocked at 2.70GHz and a max turbo frequency of 3.50GHz. The fact that it’s a dual-core CPU in a world where quad-core CPUs are increasingly the norm is a bit of a shame, but if you're using this as a pure gaming machine that doesn’t run CPU-intensive games, then you shouldn’t see too much of a performance impact.

The 16GB of RAM is a good amount – though really Medion could have stuck with 8GB to further lower the price. Still, 16GB will give this laptop a bit of future-proofing where it lacks in other departments.

Windows 10 Home is installed on a 256GB SSD, which means the Erazer P7647 will boot and perform quickly, and it also features a 1TB hard drive. This dual storage option is a nice touch, as it means you don’t have to worry about storing your games, while still getting the benefits of an operating system running from an SSD.

Overall, the specs are about what we would expect for a gaming laptop of this price. Sure, there are more powerful machines out there, but they also cost a lot more. It appears that Medion has done a good job of balancing power with value.

Performance

Considering the price and specifications, we kept our expectations in check when it came to the gaming performance of the Medion Erazer P7647 – and this proved to be a wise decision.

As we thought, there’s enough graphical oomph here to handle older games very well, with mid-to-high settings. More demanding older games, such as GTA V, needed their settings on medium, but still played very well.

Newer games, such as Dues Ex: Mankind Divided and Hitman proved more strenuous – and ‘Ultra’ graphics settings sent frames per second counts into the single digits, making the games stutter and generally become unplayable. It was also during these games that the fans kicked in audibly; while not terribly loud some people may find them distracting – but it’s a fact of life when you’re running powerful components in a small laptop form factor.

As you can see from our benchmark scores, at low settings the Medion Erazer P7647 returns perfectly playable frame rates in games, and returns high scores in undemanding benchmark tests. 

It actually scores marginally lower in the 3DMark benchmarks compared to the HP Pavilion Gaming Notebook, but in reality the performance of both machines is very close. This doesn’t paint the Medion Erazer P7647 in a particularly flattering light, however, as the HP machine is both older and cheaper.

The 17.3-inch 1080p screen does a very good job of displaying games, media and the Windows 10 desktop, with bright and vibrant colors. The fact that it's ‘just’ 1080p means games look good, while the resolution isn't as demanding as 1440p or 4K.

Battery life was very short, at just 3 hours 12 minutes, in our TechRadar battery benchmark, which plays a looped 1080p video until the battery becomes depleted. As anyone who's familiar with gaming laptops knows, this kind of reduced battery life is expected (though no less annoying) due to the power-hungry innards of most devices.

So this is definitely not the laptop you want for working on away from a power source – our day-to-day testing bore this out, as we were needing to plug it in every four hours to charge it up, even when doing relatively simple tasks such as word processing and web browsing.

Overall, the Medion Erazer P7647 performs as expected of a mid-to-low range gaming laptop. It doesn’t excel at pushing modern games with graphical effects turned up to 11, but it will handle pretty much any game – you’ll just need to tweak the settings first, and live with reduced visuals.

We liked

The Medion Erazer P7647 does a good job of playing games at reasonable settings for a decent price. This isn’t a monster rig that will push out 4K visuals at impeccable frame rates – but for that you’d have to pay much, much more.

Instead, it does a competent job that makes its relatively low price tag very tempting. We also quite like the no-nonsense design of this laptop.

We didn’t like

While we understand the logic of going for an older, lower-powered graphics card, it does limit the capabilities – and future-proofing ability – of this laptop. While it does include some nice new components, the reality is there are more powerful gaming laptops out there.

Also, while we appreciate the design, in this age of increasingly thin and light gaming laptops the Medion Erazer P7647 could quickly look like a bit of a relic.

Battery life is also low, even for a gaming laptop.

Final verdict

At the beginning of this review we mentioned the careful balancing act that Medion needed to perform with the Medion Erazer P7647, to create an affordable gaming laptop without making too many compromises.

On the whole, we feel that Medion has done a good job. We weren’t expecting a premium design, but the company has done well to make the Medion Erazer P7647 look good, while also feeling secure thanks to the rubberized body. It’s not as chunky or bulky as gaming laptops of yore, and it puts its size to good use by including a range of connectivity options, both old and new, as well as a DVD drive.

When it comes to power the compromises are more apparent, with the Erazer P7647 relying on a dual-core processor and an ageing GTX 950M graphics card. This limits the laptop’s ability to play modern games at the absolute maximum visual settings, but crucially these games can still be played, as long as you don’t mind tweaking settings and lowering graphical options.

So, if you want an all-singing, all-dancing gaming laptop that can handle VR and run games at ultra settings, this is not the laptop for you. However, if you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars or pounds on a laptop, and want a machine on which you can play games that still look good, but don’t have all the bells and whistles they'd have when played on a monster gaming rig, then the Medion Erazer P7647 is worth consideration.