LG Gram 17 review: lighter than it seems

Seventeen! This laptop has a 17 inch screen. It also weighs 2.98 pounds.

It is very unusual to see a 17-inch laptop under four pounds, much less than three. Combine that with a starting price of $ 1,499 (our model currently costs $ 1,699), and you’re looking for a fairly niche demographic. However, for that niche, this laptop continues.

LG has not reinvented the wheel; 2020 Gram 17 is very much an iterative update to the 2019 model. The company has made a few key improvements: the chassis and keyboard layout have received minor tweaks, the battery is bigger, and there’s a new 10th Gen Core i7-1065G7 underneath. of the hood. But the massive screen is still the singular reason to buy this laptop, so you should only spend $ 1,699 on this if you are sure it is what you want.

It’s hard to put into words how big a 17-inch screen is. The panel has a 2560 x 1600 resolution with a 16:10 aspect ratio, so it’s not only wide, but you get a little more vertical space compared to many popular laptops. Using the LG Gram 17 feels more similar to using a desktop computer than a 16-inch 13-inch screen. Is a ton from space. I almost always had two (or even three) things open at once and I never had to walk away.

It is also an attractive panel. There’s a bit of a glare, but I had no trouble working in bright environments with a medium-brightness display. Colors looked great (the Gram covers 99 percent of the sRGB gamut and 74 percent of AdobeRGB), and the details were sharp. The videos are, of course, massive. I watched half an episode of Dark at the Gram, and the characters looked miniature when I ended up on a 13-inch device.

It is not a perfect display, of course. There were some ghost images in the action scenes, and it was visible enough that I probably wouldn’t want to play games on the Gram 17. (Of course, it doesn’t have the power to be a gaming rig anyway. More on that more. Go ahead.) It’s not the brightest screen out there either; It reached 369 nits with maximum brightness. That’s enough for indoor browsing, but you probably want something brighter if you plan to do creative work outside or near a bright window. MacBook Pro 16 and Dell XPS 17 get up to 500 nits. And there’s no touch support – an omission that’s understandable (touchscreens come with a severe weight penalty) but still disappointing at a price of $ 1,699.

Sometimes I thought the Gram panel was too big. When working on a full screen Google Doc, there was so much emptiness on each side that I felt like I wasted space. That is, again, a reason to seriously consider whether you need this type of machine. If you don’t often work in split-screen mode, you’re likely to leave some of the panel unused, and at that point, you can get any number of 15-inch and 16-inch models for a lower price.

However, you’re not sacrificing portability for that screen space, even close. At 2.98 pounds, the Gram 17 is surprisingly light for its size. It’s a feather compared to the MacBook Pro 16 (4.3 pounds), the Dell XPS 17 (4.65 pounds), and the HP Envy 17 (6.02 pounds). But it’s also lighter than many smaller computers, including the Dell XPS 15 (4 lbs.), The 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 (3.4 lbs.), And the HP Specter x360 15 (4.64 lbs.). I think the massive chassis (14.98 x 10.34 x 0.69 inches) makes the Gram feel lighter than it is because it expects it to weigh more. Wearing it feels like wearing nothing.

Such a lightweight laptop generally comes with important caveats. However, there is nothing the Gram 17 does terribly.

The battery life is exceptional. The 2020 Gram comes with an 80Wh battery (last year it was 72Wh), and I got 10 hours. (I ran the machine through my workload of about a dozen tabs from Chrome, Slack, some Zoom calls, and occasional streaming from YouTube or Spotify, at 200 nits of brightness on the Better Battery profile.) That’s better than I got from the MacBook Pro, the XPS 15 and almost any other laptop of this size. (However, the included 48W charger takes a while to charge the Gram. Within an hour, it only charged the battery by 37 percent.)

The keyboard is great; it’s backlit and you can switch between “low” and “high” brightness levels with one of the function keys (though I didn’t notice a big difference between them). The wide chassis leaves plenty of room for a numeric keypad, another feature we don’t see on ultrabooks every day.

LG has made some keyboard adjustments since last year: some keys (including Backspace, Enter, Shift, and 0 on the numeric keypad) were made larger, and a fourth column was added to the numeric keypad that includes large input keys and plus. I think the backspace key is still a bit small, I accidentally hit the adjacent Numlock from time to time, but otherwise the typing experience was excellent and I kept my typical speeds.

The touchpad is smooth and a comfortable click. However, like last year’s Gram, it is placed in the center of the chassis rather than directly under the space bar. That meant that my right hand often rested on the touchpad while writing, and I had occasional issues with palm rejection. It is not a deciding factor, but it takes time to get used to it.

However, there are two areas in which the Gram 17 does not live up to its price. The first is design: it’s just not a looker. LG has removed a large, visible hinge that made last year’s model look a bit thick. But it’s still a thick laptop, and the chassis is made of a dark silver magnesium alloy that feels like cheap plastic. The Gram is not necessarily ugly, but it would look like a toy next to an XPS.

The second is performance.

The Gram 17 will do the job for most people who are just browsing. I loaded dozens of Chrome tabs with no issues and only saw a slowdown if multiple downloads were running or files were copied in the background. The chassis maintained a comfortable temperature during my daily use, and I only heard the fans or felt intense heat under very heavy loads. I hooked Cinebench R20 five times, and the CPU was consistently maintained in the mid-80s, never going 90 degrees centigrade.

However, if you were planning to play, the Gram is out. I tried to run Shadow of the Tomb Raider at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 at its lowest possible setting, and the laptop achieved a paltry 12 fps average. (It was a slow and stuttering experience.) It also took 30 minutes to complete a complex export in Adobe Premiere Pro, a significantly worse result than we’ve seen on other devices with integrated graphics like the XPS 13 and Surface Laptop 3 (not to mention the MacBook Pro or anything with a GPU ). Even basic photo editing in the Photos app was heavy lifting.

These results are not unexpected, and they don’t make the Gram 17 a bad laptop. It is important to know what you are paying for. The intention of the Gram line is not to create workhorses; it is to make the laptop as light as possible. In that category, the Gram 17 has managed to rise to the top of its class.

That means there is a very specific user for whom this laptop is a big buy: it should require a 17-inch screen, it should worry about lightness above all else, and it shouldn’t plan to do anything to tax the integrated graphics. If you check those three boxes, the LG Gram 17 is the obvious choice for you.

If that’s not you, there are better options.

Photograph by Monica Chin / The Verge