Medion Erazer P66019
A tower PC that reaches for the heights
The last couple of desktop tower PCS we’ve seen from Medion have featured ed older Intel processors, leaving room inn its budget for high-end Nvidia Geforce graphics cards. That’s fine if your priority rity is to play the latest games or use ambitious photo- and video-editing programs, but for all-round performance nce it makes more sense to start with a nice ce new eighth-generation processor.
The six-core i5-8400 inside the Erazer er P66019 is one such example. This sits alongside a low-midrange but still very y capable 3GB Geforce GTX 1060 graphics ics card, a 1TB hard drive and a 128GB SSD SD for Windows 10, all for a reasonable £804. So has Medion fielded a true all-rounder? nder?
The i5-8400 is certainly faster than its predecessor, the quad-core i5-7400, especially if you push it hard with tasks that use all six cores. These tasks include photo and video editing and transcoding (converting files from one format to another), although at a pinch you might see the benefit when doing something fancy in Excel or running one of the few 3D games that like a lot of processing as well as graphics power. In general multitasking, however, we saw less of a leap in performance than we’d hoped.
It’s not as if there aren’t other options, either. The Wired2fire Pyro Talon (£884 from www.snipca.com/28207, see our review, Issue 531) may be notably pricier, having gone up since we reviewed it at £850 (not unusual, thanks to component price fluctuations), but its AMD Ryzen 5 2600 processor trounced the i5-8400 in our tests, achieving more than twice its overall score. You might not see such a big difference in all circumstances, but that’s a huge margin. The Talon comes with the 6GB version of the GTX 1060, too, which gave us higher frame rates in every game we tested. And although 8GB of memory is reasonable, the Talon’s 16GB gives it the edge yet again.
If you don’t want to pay any more than £804, Palicomp’s AMD Gravity RYZ1 (£800 from www.snipca.com/26521, see Issue 518) is still pretty quick, thanks to its Ryzen 5 1600, and has a highercapacity SSD than the Erazer.
The Erazer’s meagre 128GB SSD connects to the fast M.2 socket but uses the old SATA III interface, which limits read speeds to less than 500 megabytes per second. The disappointing write speed of just 178Mb/sec was entirely the SSD’S fault, however. It’s faster than a hard drive, but not by as much as it should be. You’d have to ditch this if you wanted to replace it with a really fast SSD later, although there’s also a free SATA 2.5in and one 3.5in bay, as well as the 1TB hard drive and DVD writer that are included. A handy SD card reader is built into the front, and it’s equipped with 802.11ac Wi-fi – something many desktop PCS come without, and which would cost an extra £30 or so. The fastest external connection the Erazer offers is USB 3.0, but monitors are well catered for, with three Displayports, one HDMI and one DVI-D port.
This is a compact, unobtrusive tower PC with a decent processor and graphics card that’s good enough for general work, creative tasks and gaming. If it turned up on our desk, we’d be happy to use it, but there are some brilliant mid-priced PCS around at the moment, so the P66019 is up against some stiff competition.
Has a decent processor and graphics card that are good enough for general and creative work