Aldi Medion PC
A well built gaming PC that’s small and quiet – and great value.
“The whole system purrs very quietly when idling and, frankly, feels like one of the best, most solidly-built PCs we’ve seen from any of Australia’s systems integrators”.
DESKTOP PC $1,999 | MEDION.COM/AU
I still talk about the day I bought my son his very own full-sized jumping castle for $200 from Aldi. Ever since I’ve been looking for a better bargain to beat it. Can the famously-cheap store do so with this gaming PC?
Medion is a German computer brand and Aldi is the exclusive distributor in Australia. The Erazer X67127 is based around a modified InWin 301 mini-ATX Tower which sports illuminated RGB detailing at the front, an LED exhaust fan at the rear and two, easily-removable matte-black side panels (one of which has hexagonally-detailed vents) that match the rest of the chassis. In the box is an optional Perspex panel which we recommend using as it allows you to peer into the impressively-cablemanaged interior with its three RGB case fans and illuminated heatsink-fan. The whole system purrs very quietly when idling and, frankly, feels like one of the best, most solidlybuilt PCs we’ve seen from any of Australia’s systems integrators.
The specs are impressive too. The CPU is Intel’s 9th-Generation Coffee Lake i5-9400 which has six cores and a stock speed of 2.9GHz but which can ramp-up to 4.1GHz. There are two 8GB sticks of Samsung DDR4-2666 RAM, a 512GB PCIe SSD by Phison and a 1TB mechanical hard disk. Everything is plugged into an MSI Mortar motherboard and graphics come courtesy of Nvidia’s powerful RTX 2070 card. There’s not much room for upgrades (just two spare RAM slots and a PCI-Express x16 slot) but, as off-the-shelf PCs go, this has got pretty much everything you need to handle 4K games and VR.
The front of the case offers two USB 2 ports plus two headphone jacks while the rear sports two USB 3 ports (one Type-A and one Type-C), two additional USB 2 ports, a PS/2 peripheral port, Gigabit Ethernet, five audio jacks and an optical port. There’s onboard graphics but you’ll want to use the Nvidia’s connectors. The system comes with a functional, unbranded optical mouse. A keyboard is not included.
The i5 CPU and its six cores (and six threads) scored 961 in the Cinebench R20 benchmark which rivals a two-generation-old hyperthreaded Core i7. Scores of 4,163 in PCMark 8 and 4,784 in PCMark 10 Express are, Futuremark tells us, both spot-on for a typical 4K gaming machine. 9,387 3DMarks in Firestrike Extreme and 5,030 in Firestrike Ultra are good but slightly low considering the powerful Nvidia RTX 2070 – suggesting there’s some bottlenecking from the processor.
Meanwhile, in the ageing Warhammer II Battle test it averaged 66fps at 2,560 x 1,440 resolution. However, when we tried the punishing Metro Exodus Extreme benchmark it averaged just 26fps (34fps at 1080p) – you’ll need to drop the settings to keep things smooth.
It’s worth noting that the fans ramp up and become audible when under a gaming load, but it never becomes more than an audible swoosh.
Ultimately, it’s no $200 jumping castle but it’s small, quiet, well-built, costs slightly-less than the sum of its parts, has a two-year RTB warranty and represents very good value at $1,999.