LG Gram 17
A great choice if you’re looking for a super-lightsuper-ligh 17in laptop, with stellar batterybat life another key attractionattract
SCORE
PRICE Core i7/16GB/512GB, £1,292 £1,29 from argos.co.uk
(£1,550 inc VAT)
If you’re looking for a work work-fromhome laptop, LG believes it has the answer in the LG Gram 17. This h 17in laptop has all of the powe power that h most people will need, phenomenal phenom battery life and a 17in screen that th stretches from here to infinity when h compared to 13.3in ultraporta ultraportables.
But what makes it so very c clever is that LG packs all this into a cha chassis that weighs a cat’s hair over 1.3kg. 1. k It’s a truly remarkable achievement that puts the Gra Gram into a category all on its own. In fact, the LG Gram 17’s competition is itself: we gave this product a five-star review last year ( see issue 295, p60), when it was powered by eighth-generation Intel Core processors, and you may still find it online for a lower price.
Expanding range
While last year’s Gram 17 was only available with one specification (Core i7, 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD), it’s a sign of LG’s confidence that this year the Gram comes in a range of three. I’m not convinced LG should have bothered with the Core i7 version with 256GB of storage because that’s a recipe for “you’re running out of storage space” frustration, but there’s certainly an argument for saving
£150 and buying the Core i5/8GB of RAM/512GB SSD option. It’s only a shame that LG doesn’t offer a 1TB version to match the pre-production sample we previewed four months ago ( see issue 307, p62).
LG sent me the UK’s top-of-therange model, and it is fast – as long as you’re looking for short bursts of action. It helps that LG has wisely upgraded the SATA disk in last year’s model to a fast PCIe drive this time around, which hit highly respectable sequential read/write speeds of 2,404MB/sec and 1,781MB/sec using AS SSD benchmarking software.
If, however, you seek a multithreaded monster to chew through video-editing tasks, the Gram would be a poor choice. During our tough benchmark, I regularly saw the Core i7-1065G7 processor drop down to 2GHz from its Turbo Boost maximum of 3.9GHz. This is a sign of limited cooling and is common to ultra-sleek chassis such as the one on show here. It’s not a problem in itself; just something to be aware of before you buy.
“A weight of a cat’s hair over 1.3kg is a remarkable achievement that puts the LG Gram 17 into a category all on its own”
The daily grind
All of this means that the LG Gram 17 has enough power to meet most people’s day-to-day demands for many years to come. The question then comes of what it’s like to use? The most important factors here are the keyboard and the screen, because there’s no point in buying a 17in laptop if it’s going to spend most of its time powering a dedicated monitor. You’re buying the Gram to be all the computer you need, including the main display.
The good news is that this screen, complete with its 2,560 x 1,600 resolution, is simply excellent. It’s an IPS panel so we’d expect the wide viewing angles on offer - important when the screen is so large – but LG matches it with a maximum brightness of 422cd/m2 and superb colour accuracy. In the sRGB colour space, it covered 93.5% of the gamut with an average Delta E of 0.59. The only minor criticism I can fl i ng at this screen is that it doesn’t support touch and its brightness dips by 5% to 10% at the edges, but it took a colorimeter to spot the latter.
I have more mixed feelings about the keyboard. It has several factors in its favour, including a quiet typing action, well separated cursor keys and a dedicated number pad to the right. Again, this adds to LG’s argument that this laptop is ideal for remote workers, as it reduces the need for a separate keyboard.
I’m less fond of the single-height Enter key, but my real criticism is for the lack of “feel” here. There isn’t much travel, which isn’t surprising bearing in mind the lack of distance available before you start reaching vital components, but LG’s engineers should spend some time ripping apart Lenovo’s ThinkPads and working out how to add that feeling of resistance. I’m being picky, and there’s every chance I’d get used to this action if I used it continually for three years, but there’s an equal chance it would annoy me.