Review: The Gram by LG is a light and zippy laptop

LG is back in the Australian laptop market with its elegant Gram range of Windows laptops.

LG’s 17-inch Gram laptop

LG is back in the Australian laptop market with its elegant Gram range of Windows laptops and we tried one out. We associate LG with TVs and a myriad of appliances, but we don’t normally associate it with laptops, so this happening has a bit of buzz about it.

The Gram, as its name suggests, is about lightness. The weights of the 14, 16 and 17 inch models are 999 grams, 1,199g and 1,350g. The 17-inch Gram is large, but I can hold it in one hand.

The three Grams have magnesium alloy chassis and look beautiful. The question is whether their beauty is matched with power and capability.

This range has an interesting market. LG says that over the next year, two in five (44 per cent) of Australian consumers plan to upgrade their laptop for both personal and work use. They want faster storage, speed and better battery life. The gram targets people working at home who want a laptop that covers their needs while working at home too.

17-inch LG Gram

The 17-inch model which I’ve been testing has a full-sized keyboard with a number pad and a large trackpad that matches the 16:10 dimensions of the display. My only beef is that the top row of keys is half-height; on the big models there’s plenty of room for full-sized keys.

The rest of the keys are large and slightly raised so you should hit them cleanly. I had a few issues because the lower left and right keys on the laptop are ordered differently compared to my PC keyboard, but that’s a matter of developing new muscle memory to hit them correctly.

You’ll need the trackpad and a mouse as these models are not touchscreen devices. That’s not so unusual these days with touch screens more suited to 2-in-1 laptops where you use the screen separately as a tablet. The Gram screen has a narrow bezel with an HD selfie camera at the top.

The big question is performance. This laptop has an 11th generation Intel Core i7-1165g7 processor designed for power efficiency. It has 16GB of DDR4 memory, 512GB of SSD storage and on-board Intel Iris Xe Graphics. There is no separate dedicated graphics.

14, 16, and 17-inch LG Gram laptops

Novabench gave the tick of approval to the CPU but didn’t rate the graphics performance well compared to a mid level gaming PC. The test suggests this is a fast laptop suited to business but it’s frame rate is too low to be regarded as a gaming laptop. Novabench rated it below mid-level gaming performance however you should be able to play less resource intensive games.

Another important feature is support for Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 and the latest version of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6. Don’t bet on Thunderbolt 4 achieving its maximum 40Gbps transfer speed but it does support output to two 4K displays simultaneously.

On the 17-inch Gram, you get two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports, HDMI and a headphone jack on the left side, and two USB-3.2 Gen 2 ports, a microSD slot and Kensington lock slot at right. That line-up suggests you can avoid taking around an army of attachments, although you will need one for cable Ethernet.

The Gram also supports fingerprint login.

You can both power a Gram & display its contents using the latest LG monitors

My test unit has a 17-inch, 2560x1600 IPS LCD screen which is a tad below 4K resolution. It offers a matt display, so it’s not glossy, a feature I like, particularly its clarity. It’s 16:10 wide-screen display is well suited to watching movies, but offers a little more height for preparing documents and surfing the internet.

There is some flex or bend in that large screen which to me makes it a tad fragile. Once upon a time, we’d flex test screens at The Australian until one on a $2000 laptop actually snapped. So we don’t test our luck too far. However, I have been a fan of more solid screens since.

There is the all important issue of battery life. LG claims 19 hours of battery life with 150 nits of brightness. We ran our usual battery test playing 1080p video at 50 per cent resolution and achieved 15 hours 57 minutes battery life. That’s very good especially for a laptop with a near 4K display, but be aware you will chew through the juice with brightness turned up high as we did.

There are two 14-inch models with Core i5 processors and 256GB and 512GB storage. They come in silver and white. There are three 16-inch models with Core i5 and i7 processors, 512GB storage and 8 or 16GB of RAM in black or white. The 17-inch model is in black only.

The smaller 14-inch LG Gram

Prices range from $1799 to $3009 for the top end 17-inch model, my review unit.

For a time, LG is throwing in a free 29-inch ultrawide monitor with 16 and 17 inch models.

While this is the first Gram model in Australia, it’s actually the third generation of Gram.

In the end the Gram offers power for home and work with very fast connections courtesy of Thunderbolt 4. It will be too expensive for some, and it’s not a gaming laptop, but if you love light weight laptops with a bit of punch, the Gram could be right for you.