LG Gram 15 Review - The Lightest 15 Laptop Made Much Better!!
Hey, how's it going Dave2D here, so in late 2015 I did a review of the 14 inch LG. Gram. It was a thin and light ultrabook But it had a few too many compromises for me to just openly recommend it to everyone. This is the 15 inch version It's been updated for 2017 it uses their magnesium carbon nanotube material again a super Lightweight metal alloy But they've done a respectable job with the build on the 15-inch.
The top deck doesn't have much flex for how light the device is The bottom panel also is much better than I expected The hinge is well made and it's actually one hand openable despite being so thin, it's pretty cool The screen and top panel still have more flex than I'd like but unless you're really rough on this device You'll be fine. If you're worried then just get a sleeve. Now the reason why they go with this magnesium alloy is so that they can make this laptop Extremely light. It's 2.4 Pounds, so that's just barely over a kilogram And it starts at $1200 depending on specs so by comparison when you take an equally spec'ed XPS 13 That's 2.7 Pounds for a 13.3 Inch screen the LG.
Gram is 2.4 Pounds with a 15.6 Inch screen It has a lighter weight with a significantly bigger screen, and when you hold it. It's awesome It's incredibly light and easy to carry around It doesn't feel like an indestructible tank, but if you're trying to get to this weight There's not much more you can do. The port selection is pretty good for a device like this There's a Micro SD slot, Audio jack, a bunch of USB-A Ports HDMI and one USB-C Port It doesn't support Thunderbolt 3, but they've included an ethernet dongle If you want to get inside It's actually quite difficult to open up. You have to remove some rubber feet Some hinge covers, and then pry the bottom panel off it can be done though inside you'll see a single slot of DDR4 RAM, my unit has 16 gigs The Storage uses a sata interface the speeds are actually very fast for Sata3, but it's still limited its No nVme The battery down here has been upgraded to 60 Whrs, a massive improvement over 35 Whrs of the older Model And this battery was one of the biggest complaints about the previous generation And LG listened, and they made it significantly better so right now on this model I'm able to comfortably get eight hours of regular use, with the screen at 250 Nits And this is just like regular work if you want to watch movies or if you want to lower the screen brightness You'll get longer battery life especially with the KabyLake chip But the important thing is that you can go through a full day of use without bringing your charger around Open the screen you can see that the bezels are really thin It rivals the thin bezels of the XPS line from Dell not as thin But close.
The display is a 1080p IPS panel, glossy finish And it's a touchscreen It gets reasonably bright. Bright enough for any kind of indoor work The viewing angles and the color gamut are also, not bad The Webcam is located on the bottom hinge because of the bezels, so you have that upward camera angle again. The keyboard is back with this year that's another big thing that LG address the main keyboard area is pretty comfortable to use the keys only Have 1.1 Millimeters of travel. Not a lot, but they feel responsive enough, and it's roomy There's a number pad on the right, but the keys there feel cramped to me.
I don't ever use those keys So I'm not the best judge of them But if you need a number pad for work This has one of them. The trackpad is ok, for the most part tracking is accurate and the click mechanism feels good It uses Elan drivers I wish it was using Windows precision drivers But these ones aren't bad. In terms of performance this unit is running a KabyLake i7 with the HD 620 It's a very snappy system when doing work, browsing the web or watching videos. Gaming performance isn't amazing, this isn't a device for pro-gamers But the HD 620 can get playable frame rates in lighter games on low settings.
If you want to edit videos I'd stick with 1080p footage. 4K is going to be choppy and definitely put your footage on an external drive The thermals are respectable this time. It obviously gets warm when you push it hard But nothing uncomfortable. The fans don't come on often and even when they do They're still pretty quiet, and when I run heavier benchmarks on this thing there is CPU.
Throttling with not bad considering the form factor and when I run the stress test from 3Dmark it passes Which is really weird to see on an ultra-light laptop. The speakers are good. They don't sound amazing in terms of audio quality I mean, they are small ultrabook speaker(s) But they're clear enough and they position them in a way to actually fire outwards toward the sides so that the stereo effect is really Pronounced on the system, so that's the 15-inch Gram, and I kind of find it weird that more companies Don't make devices like this. I mean you can find 13-inch thin and light ultrabooks everywhere There's like an army of them to choose from.
If you're looking for something with a bigger screen this is one of very few. With the gram You're getting a magnesium alloy casing with decent build quality for its weight. The 15 inch touchscreen is above average The brightness, color accuracy and the viewing angles are all pretty good, but it's not perfect The keyboard is comfortable to use and the backlighting is a very welcome addition this year. The trackpad is nice to use, there's nothing I dislike about it.
The KabyLake CPU and HD. 620 Are great performers for light to moderate tasks and are well-cooled. The ram and the storage are replaceable if need be but it's not Easy to get in there. And then powering this device is a 60 watt hour battery that will comfortably get you 8 hours of real usage so the 2017 LG Gram.
Much improved. Significantly better battery life That's the big one for me. The KabyLake upgrade is nice. The backlit keyboard is nice I mean some people are just gonna love those things but for me the extended battery life is just..That brings his laptop From a cool kind of niche product to something that I would openly recommend for anyone who's looking for something that's thin and light with a big screen.
That's the end of this video Hope you guys enjoyed it, thumbs if you liked, subs if you loved it, see you guys next time (outro plays).
The top deck doesn't have much flex for how light the device is The bottom panel also is much better than I expected The hinge is well made and it's actually one hand openable despite being so thin, it's pretty cool The screen and top panel still have more flex than I'd like but unless you're really rough on this device You'll be fine. If you're worried then just get a sleeve. Now the reason why they go with this magnesium alloy is so that they can make this laptop Extremely light. It's 2.4 Pounds, so that's just barely over a kilogram And it starts at $1200 depending on specs so by comparison when you take an equally spec'ed XPS 13 That's 2.7 Pounds for a 13.3 Inch screen the LG.
Gram is 2.4 Pounds with a 15.6 Inch screen It has a lighter weight with a significantly bigger screen, and when you hold it. It's awesome It's incredibly light and easy to carry around It doesn't feel like an indestructible tank, but if you're trying to get to this weight There's not much more you can do. The port selection is pretty good for a device like this There's a Micro SD slot, Audio jack, a bunch of USB-A Ports HDMI and one USB-C Port It doesn't support Thunderbolt 3, but they've included an ethernet dongle If you want to get inside It's actually quite difficult to open up. You have to remove some rubber feet Some hinge covers, and then pry the bottom panel off it can be done though inside you'll see a single slot of DDR4 RAM, my unit has 16 gigs The Storage uses a sata interface the speeds are actually very fast for Sata3, but it's still limited its No nVme The battery down here has been upgraded to 60 Whrs, a massive improvement over 35 Whrs of the older Model And this battery was one of the biggest complaints about the previous generation And LG listened, and they made it significantly better so right now on this model I'm able to comfortably get eight hours of regular use, with the screen at 250 Nits And this is just like regular work if you want to watch movies or if you want to lower the screen brightness You'll get longer battery life especially with the KabyLake chip But the important thing is that you can go through a full day of use without bringing your charger around Open the screen you can see that the bezels are really thin It rivals the thin bezels of the XPS line from Dell not as thin But close.
The display is a 1080p IPS panel, glossy finish And it's a touchscreen It gets reasonably bright. Bright enough for any kind of indoor work The viewing angles and the color gamut are also, not bad The Webcam is located on the bottom hinge because of the bezels, so you have that upward camera angle again. The keyboard is back with this year that's another big thing that LG address the main keyboard area is pretty comfortable to use the keys only Have 1.1 Millimeters of travel. Not a lot, but they feel responsive enough, and it's roomy There's a number pad on the right, but the keys there feel cramped to me.
I don't ever use those keys So I'm not the best judge of them But if you need a number pad for work This has one of them. The trackpad is ok, for the most part tracking is accurate and the click mechanism feels good It uses Elan drivers I wish it was using Windows precision drivers But these ones aren't bad. In terms of performance this unit is running a KabyLake i7 with the HD 620 It's a very snappy system when doing work, browsing the web or watching videos. Gaming performance isn't amazing, this isn't a device for pro-gamers But the HD 620 can get playable frame rates in lighter games on low settings.
If you want to edit videos I'd stick with 1080p footage. 4K is going to be choppy and definitely put your footage on an external drive The thermals are respectable this time. It obviously gets warm when you push it hard But nothing uncomfortable. The fans don't come on often and even when they do They're still pretty quiet, and when I run heavier benchmarks on this thing there is CPU.
Throttling with not bad considering the form factor and when I run the stress test from 3Dmark it passes Which is really weird to see on an ultra-light laptop. The speakers are good. They don't sound amazing in terms of audio quality I mean, they are small ultrabook speaker(s) But they're clear enough and they position them in a way to actually fire outwards toward the sides so that the stereo effect is really Pronounced on the system, so that's the 15-inch Gram, and I kind of find it weird that more companies Don't make devices like this. I mean you can find 13-inch thin and light ultrabooks everywhere There's like an army of them to choose from.
If you're looking for something with a bigger screen this is one of very few. With the gram You're getting a magnesium alloy casing with decent build quality for its weight. The 15 inch touchscreen is above average The brightness, color accuracy and the viewing angles are all pretty good, but it's not perfect The keyboard is comfortable to use and the backlighting is a very welcome addition this year. The trackpad is nice to use, there's nothing I dislike about it.
The KabyLake CPU and HD. 620 Are great performers for light to moderate tasks and are well-cooled. The ram and the storage are replaceable if need be but it's not Easy to get in there. And then powering this device is a 60 watt hour battery that will comfortably get you 8 hours of real usage so the 2017 LG Gram.
Much improved. Significantly better battery life That's the big one for me. The KabyLake upgrade is nice. The backlit keyboard is nice I mean some people are just gonna love those things but for me the extended battery life is just..That brings his laptop From a cool kind of niche product to something that I would openly recommend for anyone who's looking for something that's thin and light with a big screen.
That's the end of this video Hope you guys enjoyed it, thumbs if you liked, subs if you loved it, see you guys next time (outro plays).
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