When you’re looking for a good gaming laptop, it’s often not that easy to buy the one you need, especially with more and more brands delivering some powerful options. Enter the ERAZER Defender P40, a powerful and most importantly, budget-friendly machine.
Impressive, straight out of the box
The ERAZER Defender P40 comes in a rather natural packaging that doesn’t really screen gaming laptop. The company isn’t about fancy boxes, it’s what’s inside that really counts. Once you take out the Defender P40, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by its quality. The P40 comes with a nice 17.3-inch display with WQHD resolution, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD, Core i7-13700HX processor, and a GeForce RTX 4060 on board. The most impressive thing about its specs is the fact that you won’t pay the premium price for this. Compared to similar models on the market, the Defender P40 is the cheapest on the market and truly delivers. Thanks to the 13700HX processor, this little machine is capable of running all modern games. The design itself is kept sober with a discreetly positioned Erazer logo and a sturdy black plastic case. Once you open the case, you’ll be greeted with a nice black keyboard with some white writing and white edges to make the keys more visible. Since it’s a gaming laptop, the WASD keys have a slightly widened border so they stand out a bit more. It’s a sturdy black machine with some visible copper-colored heat sinks, nothing too special or too flashy, just a basic design done right. It’s marketed as a gaming laptop but it can be used for a couple of things of course. Thanks to the Erazer Control Center, you can switch between several performance modes so you won’t overheat. A nice addition to the machine and it makes sure it’s performing as well as possible whenever you use it. From playing some demanding games to using it for work, the Defender P40 never let me down and in this month of testing it, I never really encountered real issues with it.
Yes, it can run DOOM
In order to test the P40 Defender, I played some games on PC Game Pass to easily access some demanding and less demanding games. I tested it with my controller and without it and for most games I had no issues at all. From recent big releases and open world games like Cyberpunk and even Starfield, I could play them all on the P40 Defender. Of course, depending on the games, I had to tweak with some settings but most of the games could be played with high or even ultra settings. Because of the impressive power under its hood, this machine is clearly able to deliver. If you’re looking for an all-around gaming laptop, this one certainly is a great power house and will certainly do what you want it to do. Besides gaming, the machine didn’t have any issues with 4K video editing and heavy PhotoShop/Illustrator use. It’s an impressive machine for its lower price tag. Like in all our tech reviews, I won’t focus on the specs themselves, if you want to know those you can easily Google them. Instead I want to focus on the user’s experience and this is where the P40 Defender truly shines. Everything about it, from setting it up to tweaking the settings in my games, it alls flows very naturally without any hiccups. It’s one of those machines that make your life easier, especially as a gamer. Sure, there are better and more flashy options currently on the market but in its price range, this is your best choice without a doubt.
Some downsides
Besides its stellar performance, the P40 Defender isn’t flawless. The screen isn’t of the best possible quality but that doesn’t really matter since it’s still very reasonable for the price and it’s a great overall screen nevertheless. What I didn’t really like is the weight of the machine, which comes close to 3kg and an extra kg for the power adapter. This is rather heavy and makes it less portable than I wished for. Taking this with my while traveling to work isn’t that great as its simply too heavy compared to other modern devices. If you want to spare some weight by leaving the power adapter home, that won’t be a good idea. The laptop is able to run for a couple of hours without charging but again, for a laptop this isn’t ideal. It’s best used on a stationary desk plugged into the charge while playing. Fun if you’re looking for a cheap entry point to enter PC gaming but far from perfect from a portable perspective of course.
Conclusion:
For its price, ERAZER Defender P40 is an amazing gaming laptop perfectly able of running the modern games without issues. Its biggest downfall is its weight and short operating time without charging. That being said, it still is worth your money if you’re in the market for a budget-friendly gaming machine.
