Medion Signium 27 S1 All-in-One PC review: A smart, cheap, upgradable AIO PC

Windows All-in-One PCs are among the most difficult devices to get excited about. Designed and built to a price and aimed primarily at the most utilitarian end of the corporate computing market, they are the ultimate white goods of the PC world.

It thus came as something of a surprise when Medion's UK PR team sent over the press release for its latest Signium 27 A1 AIO. Here was a device that looked rather smart and stylish despite being aggressively priced at around £750, which undercuts the likes of the MSI Pro AP242P 14M and the Lenovo ThinkCentre M90a Gen 5.

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Medion Signium 27 S1: Design

Windows' AIOs are usually boring black blocks of plastic with all the design interest of a suburban bus shelter. Credit then to Medion for cooking up something just a little different. The Signium 27 is still made of plastic, but the matte silver paint finish matches the elegant metal stand, giving the impression of something beyond call-centre utilitarianism. At first sight, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's made from aluminium rather than plastic.

It's impressively svelte, too. The screen bezels are just 15mm wide at the top and bottom, and a little over half that at the sides. The base of the stand is a compact and narrow affair that takes up a minimum of desk space, and the whole assembly only weighs 3.8Kg

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Under the centre of the screen are three LED-lit squidgy rubberised buttons. The larger middle one is a simple on/off button, while the smaller one to the left opens a simple menu to switch inputs between the PC and the HDMI-in port and adjust the brightness when used in monitor mode. The right button disables the webcam, which seems like overkill given that there's also a manual privacy shutter.

Adjustment is very limited, with nothing available in terms of height or rotation. What you can do is tilt the screen forward and back between -20 degrees and +40 degrees. To further limit the positional possibilities, the two-piece metal stand doesn't feature anything in the way of a VESA attachment, so fixing it to a monitor arm is impossible without some sort of adapter.

Medion has equipped the Signium with a decent range of ports. On the right-hand side of the unit, for easy access, there are two 5Gbps USB ports: one Type-A and one Type-C.

Around the back, there are another three more USB-A ports, two 480Mbps 2.0 and one 10Gbps, and a second Type-C port, this time supporting 10Gbps data as well as DisplayPort video and PowerDelivery charging. Accompanying those data ports is a gigabit RJ-45 LAN port, two HDMI 1.4 ports, one in and one out, a 3.5mm combination audio jack, a Kensington lock slot, and a DC-in jack for the 120W power supply.

Wireless communications come courtesy of an Intel AX211 card, which supports 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Neither of those protocols is the latest thing, but we wouldn't have been that shocked if the Medion had only supported 2.4/5Ghz Wi-Fi, so it's still a win in our book.

The bundled mouse and keyboard look rather more desirable than they are, thanks to a smart black and silver livery.

Both work well enough, though the keyboard lacks a backlight, has a rather shallow key action, and there's nothing in the way of angle adjustment. The mouse is too flat for our tastes.

On the plus side, the layout of the keyboard is good, there's a full-size numeric keypad, a wide range of status lights, and full-sized left/right arrow keys.

Both the keyboard and mouse feature a MicroUSB port for recharging duties. Thankfully, Medion includes a short charging cable. Rather than depending on Bluetooth, the mouse and keyboard connect via a 2.4Ghz wireless dongle.

Undo two Philips screws on the rear, and you can slide off the panel that covers the internal components. Not only is there space for a second M.2 2280 SSD and easy access to both SODIMM slots, but there is also space for a good old-fashioned 2.5in SATA3 HDD. This level of upgradability was wholly unexpected but most welcome.

Medion Signium 27 S1: Display, audio & webcam

Windows AIOs tend to come with very basic displays, but the Medion is just a little better. Granted, it's a standard IPS affair, and with a 1,920 x 1,080 matrix spread over a 27-inch diagonal, it's not the sharpest display around with a pixel density of just 82dpi.

Peak brightness is also nothing to write home about: 240cd/m2, though that is adequate for indoor use. There's rather more color on offer than with the likes of the MSI Pro AP242P and the Lenovo ThinkCentre M90a, with color gamut volumes of 126.5% sRGB, 89.6% DCI-P3, and 87.2% Adobe RGB.

For comparison, the MSI display only covers 92.7% sRGB, 65.6% DCI-P3, and 63.8% AdobeRGB, respectively. The Lenovo is better at 104.7% sRGB, 74.1% DCI-P3, and 71.2% Adobe RGB, but still can't match the Medion.

Combine that with a contrast ratio of 978:1, a Delta E color variance of 2.64 against the sRGB profile – just below 3, at which point the more acute observer will start to notice color deviations – and you get a screen that looks nicely colorful and natural to the naked eye.

On a more mundane level, the screen has an effective matte anti-reflective finish, so you don't need to worry about reflections from bright lights. Unsurprisingly, there's no support for HDR content, and the refresh rate is effectively limited to 60Hz at 1,920 x 1,080.

We say effectively because you can actually push the refresh rate to 75Hz, but when you do, the resolution drops to 1,080 x 720. Increase the resolution back to FullHD, and the refresh rate defaults back to 60Hz.

Buried in the bottom left and right corners of the Medion's cabinet are two loudspeakers of unstated output and dubious origin. They are better than nothing, but not by a wide margin.

Peak volume is a lowly 69dBA as measured against a pink noise source at a distance of 1m, and the sound they produce is constrained, muddy, brittle, devoid of bass, and generally tiresome. For a casual Zoom call, they'll do, but for anything else, you'll need headphones or remote speakers.

The 1080p webcam also belongs in the category of better than nothing, but only just. The images it produces are drab and extremely fuzzy, so fuzzy in fact that we at first assumed the lens was smeared in something and broke out the cotton wool buds to clean it. Alas, that was to no avail; the webcam is just plain bad.

For the record, the camera doesn't support Windows Hello facial recognition, and it also lacks the Windows Studio suite of filters and augmentations, though that's more down to the absence of an NPU on the chipset to support Windows local "AI" functions than the camera hardware.

Medion Signium 27 S1: Specs and Performance

Given the cost, the internal specification of the Signium 27 is pretty solid with a 10-core Intel Core 7 240H CPU, 32GB of dual-channel DDR4 RAM and a 1TB SSD. There's no way of accessing the internal parts of the system, so there's no way to add more storage or RAM.

The 240H processor inside the Signium is a Raptor Lake Refresh laptop chip with a 5.2GHz turbo boost speed, 6 performance cores, and Intel's basic integrated UHD Graphics GPU.

In our bespoke 4K Handbrake-based multi-media benchmark, the Signium scored 221 points. That's quite a bit behind the MSI Pro AP242P's 329, though, given that it runs a 20-core Core i7-14700, it is hardly a surprise.

The Medion's performance is more in line with what you'd expect from the likes of a 2023-era M2 MacBook Air (220) and not too far adrift of more modern Windows laptops like the Geekom X14 Pro (267) or the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (245).

In simple CPU performance, the Signium performed very similarly to the Acer TravelMate P6 we tested recently, with its Intel Core Ultra 7 258V chipset. The Medion scored 2,605 and 10,341 in the GeekBench 6 single and multi-core tests compared to 2,483 and 10,021 for the Acer laptop.

Turning to graphics performance, the Medion did rather better than expected Intel UHD Graphics 770 iGPU, which boasts 64 execution units, double that found in the MSI Pro AP242P's UHD Graphics 770 GPU chip.

The SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling benchmark scored 15fps on the Medion. That compares to 12.5fps on the MSI. Naturally, you'll get much better results from the latest generation of Arc integrated GPUs (the Intel Arc B390 can run the same test at 35fps, the Arc 140V at 25fps), but the Medion has nothing to be ashamed of.

The Signium, then, is no powerhouse, but performance across the board is more than adequate for the sort of general computing tasks you'd buy a machine like this for.

When placed under maximum stress, the single cooling fan was easily able to prevent any thermal throttling and allowed both the CPU and GPU to run at 100% utilisation for prolonged periods. The fan was also impressively quiet, even when running at full speed.

The PCIe 4 M.2 SSD (and the RAM sticks) in our review sample are made by a company called Yclongsto. That's a new name to us, but the drive performed well enough, returning consecutive read and write speeds of 3,855MB/s and 3,027MB/s which is more than adequate for basic productivity tasks.

The Signium ships with Windows 11 Home rather than Pro, but if you fancy ditching Windows altogether, then you're in luck because Ubuntu 24.04 runs perfectly with everything, other than the pointless 75Hz/720p overdrive, working as it should right out of the box.

Medion Signium 27 S1: Is it worth it?

For the asking price, the Signium 27 S1 is a very attractive package. You certainly get a lot for your money, and once set up, you won't need to buy any accessories, even if the webcam and speakers leave rather a lot to be desired in terms of quality.

Performance levels are more than adequate, the display is rather more colorful than those you'll get with some of the more expensive competition, and you can use it as a monitor thanks to that HDMI input.

The fact that it comes with a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM as standard is another bonus, as is the ease with which you can add even more RAM and storage.

The Signium also looks rather less utilitarian than much of the competition, which could be a valuable feature if you want your office to look just a little less workaday.

Medion Signium 27 S1 Specifications