Lab – Erazer saved €30 too much on its Crawler E30e gaming laptop

Black Friday sometimes gives wings to manufacturers, pushing them to offer laptops at rock bottom prices. But by trying too hard to lower prices, we end up missing the point. This time, it’s Erazer with its gaming laptop PC which forgets that by only putting one RAM stick in its PC, it will struggle to achieve the expected performance given the on-board components. Explanations.

On paper, the Erazer Crawler E30e has something to seduce. We find in particular an Intel Core i5-12450H processor, a GeForce RTX 2050 graphics card – which contrary to what its name indicates is of the same generation as the GeForce RTX 30, i.e. an Ampere architecture compatible with DLSS – and a Full IPS panel HD with a refresh rate of 144 Hz.

Everything is currently sold for €499 in several stores, and to offer its product at such a price, Erazer had to make some concessions. First of all, the operating system is not provided, so the user must obtain a Windows license and install the operating system themselves with a USB key.

Still in order to offer the lowest possible price, Erazer has equipped its Crawler E30e with only 8 GB of RAM. Worse, it does not ship two 4 GB DDR4 sticks, but only one 8 GB. This therefore deprives the Crawler E30e of the sacrosanct Dual Channel.

On this point, Erazer responds that it is easy to add an 8 GB stick to the Crawler for a relatively modest cost, which we can only confirm. But then why the hell didn’t the brand do it? We are quite doubtful about the fact that an average user who has just purchased his laptop from a large brand would have fun opening his newly acquired laptop to add the part which allows him to take full advantage of the on-board components…

13% more performance on the processor

We therefore compared the performance of the Crawler E30e with one 8 GB RAM strip to that of the same Crawler equipped with two 8 GB RAM strips, i.e. 16 GB in total.

With a single RAM stick, the Crawler E30e obtains a performance index of 111, or 13% less than the Crawler E30e with its two 8 GB sticks (125). The only software to take full advantage of the increase from 8 to 16 GB of RAM is Premiere, whose rendering time of our video on the processor is reduced by 42%. The other software in our panel that is not very sensitive to the amount of RAM benefits from performance gains of around 10% thanks to Dual Channel.

25% more in-game performance

On the gaming side, it’s a completely different story, since going from 8 to 16 GB of RAM and from Single Channel to Dual Channel allows you to gain 30% in framerate. Likewise, it is now possible to play games like Call Of Duty Modern Warfaresomething impossible with 8 GB of RAM.

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The in-game performance index of the Crawler E30e with its GeForce RTX 2050 goes from 45 to 63, a gain of 40%. However, this gap is due to the pure and simple impossibility of launching Modern Warfare. By excluding this game from the calculation of the performance index, the latter goes from 54 to 67 with Dual Channel, or 25% more.

There is therefore nothing new under the sun, since we made the same observation on the Lenovo Legion 5 two years ago already. And yet, still at the end of 2023, some manufacturers continue to use only one RAM module instead of two in order to make end-of-the-box savings; which, multiplied by the number of units sold, can certainly represent significant sums. All to the detriment of consumers, since the PC they buy underuses the capabilities of the processor and graphics card, who are particularly fond of Dual Channel.

Testing of the Erazer Crawler E30e is currently underway, and the full test will be published very soon on The Digitals.