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Initial boot up is pretty fast, thanks to the Intel Solid State drive. The program list isn't as ‘clean' as we would have hoped, with browsers, antivirus software, media players, and even Microsoft Live Essentials already installed.
The Windows performance rating is high, only held back by Nvidia graphics. An overall score of 7.1 is impressive.
After I installed a few software suites, Windows flagged a warning that the primary drive was running out of room. How could this be with a 80GB Solid State Drive configured as boot? With slight puzzlement we decided to poke around. As the image above shows, the main C: drive only has 33.4GB free. D: drive is the 750GB mechanical unit, which means that E: marked as ‘recovery' is clearly set up a dual partition on the main SSD.
Above, is the disk management overview of the system and we have a lot to discuss here.
To be honest I couldn't believe that Medion would force the user to lose more than half of the 80GB storage to a recovery partition. They could after all have put this on the 750GB mechanical drive, effectively giving the customer the full 80GB SSD partition for software installation. We spoke to the PR group handling the Medion account and we waited over a week for an answer on this before deciding to go live. In all fairness we tried to delay this review as long as possible, but gave up waiting on a response.
We would like to hope that this is a ‘one off' glitch on some level, but we can only review what we receive. If this is a standardized procedure for Medion then it has to be one of the worst decisions we have ever seen. The ‘average' consumer (if there is such a thing), won't be aware of how to make a folder on the DATA (D:) drive, then forceably change all software installations to this folder. 33GB certainly won't last a very long time, especially with Windows 7 hogging a sizeable section of the partitioned drive.
It really is a ridiculous scenario and one that needs fixed as soon as possible. If we get any feedback from Medion we will ensure they get the chance to reply in our review.
An overview of the system, highlighting the excellent Core i7 2630QM processor, a very powerful chip indeed which we have looked at before. The mainboard tab shows an American Megatrends bios. The 4GB of memory is configured to 1333mhz at 9-9-9-24 1T timings.
Medion are using a Forceware driver which is very old, V 266.39. We updated this to Forceware 285.62, which is the newest driver with many bug fixes and performance enhancements.
Overall we have to say we are extremely disappointed with this configuration. Not only is the initial install quite cluttered, and the Nvidia drivers many months old, but losing more than half of the Solid State Boot Drive to a recovery partition is ludicrous.
Comparison Systems (for specific synthetic test compares):
AlienWare M18X (featuring Core i7 2960XM Extreme Edition).
MSI CX640 (featuring Core i5 2410M).
Intel Core i5 2500k desktop processor.
Software:
3DMark 11
PCMark 7
Cinebench 11.5 64 bit
FRAPS Professional
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
CrystalDiskMark
HD Tach
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 11
Cyberlink MediaEspresso
HQV Benchmark V2
Alien V Predator
Dead Island
Dirt 3
Total War: Shogun 2
Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Asus BluRay Drive
Lacie 730 Monitor (Image Quality testing)
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Kill A Watt Meter
Nikon D3X with R1C1 Kit (4 flashes), Nikon 24-70MM lens.
Wow they fairly dropped the ball with this one.
Looks nice, but yeah that drive configuration is a ‘wtf’ moment……… someone needs to get a drilling over that.
the average joe wouldnt even notice too.
Asus do a great gaming machime for 1000
Wow what a stupid move, losing over half of the ssd to a recovery partition. Looks like they really didnt work this out very well at all.
It looks ok, but its a rather shoddy design, overall. Why would anyone want a light button to turn on side lights? Alienware do this so much better, even on their cheap 13 inch machine.
Good review, and honest