Medion SPRCCHRGD 14 S1 Elite (MD62636) review: our full review –

We weren’t necessarily expecting it, but here it is: the SPRCHRGD from Medion. A name that very much belongs to its time – Supercharged without the vowels, incredible! — for an ultrabook which, contrary to the main DNA of the brand, seeks less to be a power monster than to position itself as a lower-cost alternative to the Snapdragon X Elite. At lower cost, yes, but also at lower power unfortunately…

Technical sheet

The machine is on loan from Medion for this test.

Design

As is often the case with the manufacturer, the design of this laptop is not particularly striking. The SPRCHRGD has all the features of these white label PCs that Chinese assemblers offer at a lower price to players wishing to enter a market without too much effort. At 1.69 cm thick and 1.4 kilograms of weight, this new ultrabook is not particularly competitive, especially with its brothers and sisters integrating the Snapdragon X1 Elite, but is not abusive either.

In truth, that’s a bit of a summary of everything we see here. The metal frame? It is there, but its feeling is far from being as constructed as the different alloys that we see on the market. Or even the use of glass, like on the Dell XPS. The finishes are a little sharper than the rest, but don’t cause any problems either. In absolute terms, we are in the basic vision of an ultrabook on the market in 2024, but without any addition to make the difference. Model No. 0 from which all the others followed.

It opens well with one hand. That’s already it. But it doesn’t make you dream; he is terribly pragmatic in all his choices.

Keyboard and touchpad

The keyboard is pretty good. The lack of effort on style means that the switches integrated here are very pragmatically good: a good activation distance, a dry rebound… The keys themselves are on the other hand made of a low quality plastic, and lack a little stability. The built-in numeric keypad also makes it visually very busy, and the white backlight isn’t particularly strong.

The main problem is the touchpad. Very plastic, its glide is not particularly pleasant and its diagonal is far from impressive. But it is above all its click, very rigid and very audible, which poses a problem to us. In the ultrabook category, the additional effort is significant on these elements used on a daily basis, and the Medion SPRCHRGD is not really pleasant to use.

Connections

On the left, we find a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, a USB A 3.2 port and a USB C 4.0 port. On the right, we have a second USB A 3.2 port, a combo jack port, and a physical switch for the webcam’s electrical connection.

For an ultrabook configuration, this is a rather good selection of connectors.

Webcam and audio

We find a simple 1080p sensor which is not Windows Hello compatible; biometric recognition is given to the fingerprint reader integrated into the ignition button. For a computer powered by the Snapdragon X1 Elite, which has shown us its excellent image processing capabilities on other ultrabooks… The result is mediocre. The dynamics are not respected, the colors are bad, the sharpness is not good… What more can I say?

The speakers, at least integrated above the keyboard, are not better. The rendering is worse than an entry-level smartphone: only the treble exists, and the very high volume makes the speakers crash their lungs from 35%. Catastrophic.

Screen

The Medion SPRCHRGD 14 S1 Elite integrates a 14-inch IPS LCD panel supporting a definition of 2880 x 1800 pixels. It supports a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz.

Under our probe and with the DisplayCal software, we find volume coverage of 104.5% of the sRGB space for 74% of the DCI-P3 space. Already a first blocking point, while DCI-P3 has today largely established itself as the standard to achieve. Maximum brightness is measured at 396 cd/m², which is not crazy for an ultrabook intended to be used outside in the sun, even more so since the screen is not matte. The contrast ratio is at least good at 1237:1.

The average color temperature measured at 6195K is quite good, a little warm but not too far from the NTSC standard at 6500K. The average Delta E00 measured in the sRGb space is very good at 0.31 for a maximum difference of 0.83. In short? A very good screen 5 years ago, which is behind expectations for 2024.

Software

The biggest argument of the Medion Sprchrgd, the one that is put forward the most by the company, is that it belongs to the CoPilot+ label. Like all computers equipped with the Snapdragon X Elite, it is therefore capable of using the exclusive features linked to artificial intelligence developed for this label. We won’t repeat the match for the tenth time in 3 weeks: everything is a huge gimmick currently.

Medion offers nothing more to the experience than the built-in integration of McAfee, the world’s most resilient adware. He even has the right to his own sticker on the machine, along with that of Snapdragon.

Performances

The Medion SPRCHRGD is equipped with the Snapdragon X Elite version X1E-78-100, a 12-core SoC that can reach a frequency of 3.4 GHz. It is coupled here with 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM at 8448 MHz, and 512 GB PCIe 4.0 storage.

Benchmarks

We saw Qualcomm’s SoC exceed 1000 points in multi score and reach 120 points in single core. Here, it does not exceed 649 points in multi core and 98 points in single core. The integration of Medion seems to have been done on the bare minimum possible, without optimization allowing the activation of the ultra-efficient mode of the SoC. It’s a big disappointment.

The graphics part, however, has no difference from the rest, which can be established with the expected score of 1975 points on Steel Nomad Light. The NPU part is at least still as efficient, at 1747 points on our Procyon test.

Somewhat disappointing, but it was especially on the storage side that we were most disappointed. Here the scores look like an SSD in PCIe Gen 3.0 and not 4.0. But above all, the one integrated into our test model has an audible hiss when pushed into read/write mode. Obviously, build quality wasn’t the main reason for choosing this one.

Cooling and noise

At least the configuration heats up very little, and the fans are not noisy. This is what all computers on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform have in common, and the Medion SPRCHRGD is no exception.

Autonomy

The Medion SPRCHRGD integrates a 65 Wh battery, recharged via a 65W USB-C power supply. Nothing very special to note about this one, except that it is very small with a good cable length. It’s appreciated.

For office use, with the brightness set to 50%, we find an autonomy of around 11-12 hours which is far from matching other products incorporating the latest Qualcomm chip. Once again, the Medion SPRCHRGD seems to have soldered the SoC to its card without making any optimization effort.

Price and availability

The Medion SPRCHRGD 14 S1 Elite is already available in France, at a starting price of 1199 euros for our test configuration. For 100 euros more, you can also get 32 ​​GB of RAM and 1 TB storage.