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• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  Decent Product, But Wait For a Sale

  • Tech Insider Network Member
  • Top 100 Contributor

  📦 UNBOXING: Inside the box, you’ll find the LG Gram 17” laptop, a USB-C to USB-C charging cable, and a 65W power adapter. You’ll also get some basic documentation, but otherwise the cardboard packaging was very simplistic. I might argue that their packaging could be a little bit more secure to prevent damage during shipping, but my unit arrived without any issues. 💪 BUILD: This LG Gram weighs in at 3.22 lbs, so it’s definitely one of the lighter laptops out there—especially for a 17” laptop. However, it does use a Nano Magnesium Alloy for its chassis, so it’s still plenty sturdy with minimal keyboard deck flex. The display hinge is long and feels sturdy without a ton of wobble, and the bezels are reasonably slim. It measures in at 0.74 inches thick, 14.91 inches wide, and 10.19 inches tall. While it is quite thin, it may be larger than some other laptops in the other two dimensions, so you’ll want to check if it will fit in your bags and backpacks. 🔌PORTS: The LG Gram has a respectable selection of ports. On the left, you’ll find 2x Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 Type-C ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a 3.5mm headset jack. On the right side, you’ll find 2x USB3.2 Type-A ports along with a Kensington security slot. Since this laptop uses USB-C Power Delivery for charging, that means one of your Type-C ports will be unavailable while charging, but thankfully you’ll have a second full-feature port available for use. I appreciate having two full-feature Thunderbolt 4 ports, although they’re limited to the left side which might not be ideal for all desk setups. And having two USB-A ports makes it easier to connect with on-the-go peripherals without dongles. I would have liked to see an SD card slot, especially at this price, since I could see some folks using the Gram for some occasional on-the-go photo/video tasks. 🔧 EXPANSION & UPGRADES: Expansion is very limited on the Gram 17” The memory is soldered, so you can’t upgrade it, but its 32GB is running in a quad channel configuration at 8533 MT/s. In my experience, 32GB is often plenty of memory, and as a software developer, I feel this is sufficient for the type of work I do. The bottom panel of the laptop has its 9 screws covered by feet, so it seems evident that LG doesn’t want to encourage people from self-servicing their laptop. If you opt to remove these and service your laptop, you will find 2x m.2 slots (1 free) for storage expansion. From what I can gather, it appears the Wi-Fi / Bluetooth module is soldered onto a daughter board, so it is not directly replaceable like many other E-Key modules. Overall, the Gram isn’t really engineered for upgradability, and I think more people should consider that when shopping for a laptop in this price range. ⌨️ ​KEYBOARD & TOUCHPAD: The keyboard includes a numpad which isn’t my preference these days, but folks who do a lot of number crunching and work in spreadsheets will appreciate this. The keyboard feels spacious with good key travel and spacing. I was able to hit > 100 wpm in a MonkeyType test with high accuracy. If you’re coming from a laptop keyboard without a numpad, it might be a bit of an adjustment, but I didn’t have issues in my usage. The touchpad is also quite good, with a softened clicking noise upon pressing. Multi-touch gestures worked reliably, and I didn’t encounter issues with palm rejection while typing. Overall, a very responsive touchpad without much to complain about. 📺 DISPLAY: The display is an LG Display LP170WQ1-SPF2. Its resolution is 2560x1600, is limited to a mere 60Hz refresh rate, and uses an anti-glare a-Si TFT-LCD panel. The display response times are pretty high, so it will exhibit quite a bit of ghosting which makes it unpleasant for gaming. It does support multi-touch, but aside from that, it’s honestly not that impressive of a display. This panel was manufactured in 2021, and appears to get reasonably bright for indoor environments at a typical 350 cd/m². Outdoors, it does manage to hold its own pretty well, except in direct sunlight or at off-axis viewing angles, but that’s not much of a concern in normal use. Its 99% DCI P3 color gamut is better suited for indoor use when doing color-sensitive work. In my research, it appears that premium 17” touchscreen displays are simply uncommon compared to 16” displays. So while LG might have wanted to source a better display for the Gram, it’s very possible that they’d either be very expensive, or unreliable to source in larger quantities. But as a consumer, I want to get my money’s worth, and I simply don’t feel the display lives up to the Gram 17’s price tag. 📹​ WEBCAM & MICROPHONE: The webcam operates at a maximum of 1080p30, and I think it’s pretty crisp in reasonable lighting conditions with low noise. Unfortunately, Windows Hello is not supported, so you’ll have to rely on the fingerprint reader for security and login. The microphone array is decent, but nothing to write home about in terms of fidelity. There is also AI noise cancellation to reduce unwanted noise on the microphone. This microphone is good to have in a pinch, but I probably wouldn’t use it much outside of conference calls. 🔊 SPEAKERS & HEADPHONE: The downward-firing speakers on the Gram rely on Dolby Atmos tuning for their clarity, and thankfully that’s a good thing. While I don’t think the speakers on the Gram are going to win any serious competitions for best sound, I do think they sound decent. They’re especially effective on a flat surface like a desk or table, but will sound more muffled when on your lap on the couch. But in all my testing, I never felt like they were tinny like a greeting card. The headphone jack uses the Realtek ALC298 codec and also uses Dolby Atmos for Headphones, so this may color your listening experience. The headphone jack is decent for many headphones including my Sennheiser HD 560S, but low sensitivity headphones will not sound their best with this laptop’s 3.5mm output. In my experience, the most consistent sounding output for both speakers and headphones was using a Custom profile in the Dolby Access app with a flat EQ and with the surround virtualizer and volume leveler both disabled. ⚡ PERFORMANCE: Subjectively speaking, I think performance is good for the type of workloads one would perform on this laptop. It’s equipped with the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V which has 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores without hyperthreading. So this laptop is limited to 8 threads. And while Intel’s previous generation of Core Ultra 9 series laptops had up to 22 threads, these new V-series chips were designed for thin and light laptops to achieve better performance efficiency. In my testing, I was able to achieve a Cinebench 2024 score of 549 in Multi-core. While that score is significantly lower than the Core Ultra 9 185H with its 22 threads, most laptops using those processors would have much louder fan noise and worse battery life. On the other hand, I was able to achieve a score of 118 in Single-Core, which represents a notable uplift in performance for this new generation of Intel processors. Outside of benchmark testing, the Gram has been very quiet. Most of the time, I can’t hear the fan unless I put my ear directly to the computer. But even under load, it stays very cool without being loud. As for the Intel Arc 140V graphics, I feel that Intel is making good progress, but gamers should temper their expectations. Modern AAA titles with high fidelity graphics are not going to perform well on this GPU, and with the display supporting only 60Hz without adaptive sync, AAA games may exhibit stutter. Lesser demanding games like Lethal Company, KLETKA, and Lockdown Protocol seem to perform well at a stable 60 fps with balanced settings at a 1200p resolution. The storage in my unit is a 976 GB capacity PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD that uses the model number ESO01TBHLCJ-EL1-2AK. It uses a Phison PS5021 controller and leverages Host Memory Buffer (HMB) in lieu of having DRAM. In my test, it achieves 5218 MB/s READ and 4719 MB/s WRITE. I think for the price being paid, it would have been nice to see an SSD with DRAM since performance will degrade as less free space is available. However, I think the general use-cases for an LG Gram probably don’t necessitate high performance storage, so I feel it would feel more appropriate for LG to offer a more reasonable price for this laptop. 🔋 BATTERY: The battery life of the Gram should be a high-priority reason for people to consider it. And in my non-scientific testing, the Gram is able to achieve around 10-15 hours of battery life with lighter tasks like web browsing, spreadsheets, and some video playback. And if you want to get a bit more, you might consider using the “Power Efficiency Mode” plus “Energy Saver Mode” in Windows while on battery. Idle standby times on battery were pretty similar to the prior generation of Core Ultra laptops. In a 12 hour standby sleep period, it lost 4% battery, which means it’s not going to be anywhere near MacBook level of standby time, but if fully charged at 100%, it can probably last somewhere around 2 weeks before it’s completely depleted to 0%. This is an area for Intel to improve so they can compete with Qualcomm and Apple Silicon for battery efficiency. 🧐 CONCLUSION: For its use-case with general productivity tasks, having decent battery endurance, a large touchscreen display that is visible outdoors and has a keyboard with numpad, the Gram does things pretty well. But its price point really makes me feel less excited since its display uses older technology, the NVMe SSD is in a budget class, and it’s a less upgradeable design. There aren’t a ton of lightweight 17” laptops, which makes the Gram a more unique product. If the 17” display is not important to you, there are a lot of other thin and light 16” laptops that will deliver a more premium experience for your money.

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  Xephyroth Posted 11 months ago

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  LG - GRAM REVIEW

  • Incentivized
  • Verified Purchaser
  • Owned for 3 weeks

  Excellent product, plenty powerful with the capacity to simultaneously handle multiple complex tasks. Great value for the features provided. Also, Consumer Reports rated the 2024 version as the number one computer in it's screen (17" screen) category. I was able to get the 2025 version with upgrades at the 2024 price.

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  Joshua Posted 5 months ago

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Great extra-large "ultraportable" from LG!

  • Tech Insider Network Member
  • Top 1000 Contributor

  TLDR - Lightest 17” laptop I have ever used, exactly 3.2 lbs! (I’ve been messing with laptops for well over 20 years) Screen is decently bright (matte touchscreen is a plus in my book) plus higher res. (60hz is a miss though) The 288V is a solid performer, plus having the Arc 140V integrated GPU allows for some light gaming. Battery life is stellar. If you need a near ultra portable laptop but want a 17” screen, consider the Gram! Screen - 2560x1600 in a 17” display means it's very sharp. Brightness is solid, enough that I have to turn it down to 65 ish% at night when I usually run 80-100% on dimmer displays. In 2025 in this value class, even on a non gaming laptop, 60hz is just too low. (120hz should be the standard in this range) Matte touchscreen is so much nicer than a fingerprint magnet glossy one! Build/keyboard/ports/speakers - Super light and thin, but with near zero flex. Keyboard is great due to the near full size, little to no flex in the case around the keyboard. LEDs are decently bright, without any color control. Having 2 USB4/Thunderbolt 4 ports is great, plus a full size HDMI and audio port on one side, plus 2 full size USB-A ports on the other. Feels quite premium, but a step down from a full aluminum chassis. Speakers can get quite loud, but lack depth, but not close to the worst speakers I’ve heard in a sub ¾” in chassis. CPU/Ram - The Intel Ultra 9 288v is a speedy and fairly power efficient mobile chip, integrated with 32GB of 8533MT/s memory. The chip has 4 performance cores and 4 efficient cores, and scores about a 10,000 in Cinebench R23 multi thread test. (10172 after a single test, dropped to 9888 after a 10min loop) Everyday use is snappy, even in Windows “power efficiency” setting. (I also scored a very solid 2893 single and 11083 multi score in geekbench 6) GPU - Intel really has gotten their GPU’s to new heights in the past couple generations, and the 140v integrated into the 288v is right where it should be. You should be able to play any e-sports title at well over 60fps at medium or high settings, and even Hogwarts legacy at the lowest possible settings plus FSR set to ultra performance will net you playable performance. Any normal daily workload should not tax the 140v! (I got a 4222 graphics score in 3DMark Time Spy, and 62fps on the Forza Horizon 5 benchmark at the low preset with FSR set to quality, kept crashing if I tried XeSS) Battery - Super stellar battery life, as you’d expect from an ultra portable, albeit an extra large one. I used the old school battery eater test at 80% brightness, and the laptop stayed surprisingly quiet and lasted almost exactly 5 hours. That is a 3D rendered test, near the worst case scenario! In unscientific testing the Gram only used 12% after 2 hours of browsing articles with youtube videos running on and off at 70% percent brightness! I could easily see using this thing lasting for 12+ hours straight of real usage! I really like the 17Z90TL-H.AUB8U3 Gram (horrible model naming) for everything from watching youtube, to typing away (even this review) to jumping into some rocket league. I could see the student or business user needing more screen real estate in an extremely portable package having a great experience with this Gram! If it “checks your boxes” take a look!

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  GlennT Posted 11 months ago