LG Gram review: A lightweight 15in laptop with plenty of oomph

Big-screened laptops get a bad rep. Devices fitted with 15in displays are bulky beasts, and aren’t so backpack-friendly as their 13in counterparts. They certainly aren’t kind to the spine, either – especially if you’ve been told to improve your posture, like I have.

Case in point: Dell’s recently-launched XPS 15 2-in-1. An exquisite laptop in every respect – despite the horribly-placed Page Up and Page Down keys – its 2Kg heft is far from ideal for the daily commute.

Almost half the weight of Dell’s flashy hybrid, LG’s appropriately-named Gram laptop bucks this trend, though it’s still packed with high-end internals and fitted with a massive 15.6in display. I haven’t tested an LG laptop in ages, either – let’s get stuck in.

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LG Gram review: What you need to know

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill Windows laptop. Weighing a little over 1Kg, the Gram is much easier on the arms than its similarly-sized rivals, yet it’s powered by Intel’s Kaby Lake Intel Core i7-8550U processor and 16GB of RAM. There’s a generous 1TB of SSD storage at your disposal, too.

That’s not all LG has to offer. The Gram is equipped with a 15.6in touch-enabled Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) resolution display, with super-thin bezels bordering all four sides.

LG Gram review: Price and competition

That all sounds rather excellent doesn’t it? Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that the LG Gram is finally available to buy in the UK. No longer can you only buy one from the firm’s home country of Korea, or is it solely land-locked to the States.

If you wanted to buy the LG Gram in the UK, you can expect to fork out roughly £1,449 for one. That’s actually cheaper than what we initially expected following a previous currency conversion – the Gram can be purchased for $2,000 in the US.

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For comparison sake, you can pick up an entry-level 15in MacBook Pro for almost a grand more (£2,349), while the Dell XPS 15 will save you £150 – although its starting configuration isn’t as special. Microsoft’s similarly-specced Surface Laptop will fetch you just shy of £1,900.

LG Gram review: Design

If you haven’t twigged already, the Gram’s raison d’etre is that this laptop is significantly lighter than its similarly-sized competition, weighing a paltry 1.09Kg. No other 15in laptop is as commuter-friendly, and having used the XPS 15 2-in-1 for the past week – which weighs twice as much – this makes all the difference.

On closer inspection, however, you begin to spot how LG managed to shave off the pounds. Constructed from a “nano carbon magnesium” alloy, the chassis feels rather flimsy, and much more like plastic than its aluminium-heavy counterparts. The laptop’s lid, in particular, is capable of bending much further than I’d like.

Still. that’s the tradeoff you’re forced to accept for a laptop this light, and LG offers some reassurance on its website, saying that the Gram’s “military-grade” chassis has passed a total of seven industry-standard durability tests.

Despite its lack of bulk, the Gram is generously-equipped with ports. On the left edge you’ll spot the Thunderbolt 3-powered USB-C port, an HDMI output, a regular-sized USB Type-A port and a DC charging connector. A further two USB Type-A ports sit next to each other on the right side, along with a microSD card reader and a 3.5mm headset connector. LG also includes a USB-C to Ethernet adapter in the box.

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LG Gram review: Keyboard and touchpad

The Gram’s backlit full-sized chiclet-style keyboard is well-spaced across the width of the laptop, with a dedicated numpad on the right side. The typing action is crisp and consistent across the keyboard, but individual keys are rather small for my liking. The US layout presents some problems, too, though I can’t really complain given the origins of the test sample.

The large, glass-topped trackpad’s surface is nice and smooth, not to mention perfectly responsive. It performs Windows 10’s laundry list of multi-touch gestures without breaking a sweat.

LG Gram review: Display

The Gram’s massive screen might be its biggest positive. Measuring 15.6in from corner to corner – with skinny bezels on all four edges – the touch-enabled panel is terrific, capable of covering 96.9% of the sRGB colour gamut. In layman’s terms, that means colour performance is on a par with what you’d expect from a professional monitor with a four-figure price tag.

Brightness isn’t bad either. Our X-rite i1 display colorimeter measured 308cd/m2 at maximum brightness, which is perfectly decent for the morning commute or a dimly-lit office. The screen resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 translates to a pixel pitch of 141 PPI and everything looks perfectly sharp with a contrast ratio of 1,029:1.

Sound isn’t quite so impressive. Laptop speakers are never going to be the last word in hi-fi, but the downward-facing stereo speakers here are particularly limited, with nothing at all in the way of lower-mid or bass response and unavoidable tinniness at high volumes. This makes it very unpleasant to listen to music or watch Netflix, driving you to hook up some headphones fast.

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LG Gram review: Performance and battery life

Running the show is Intel’s quad-core, eight-thread Core i7-8550U processor, clocked at 1.8GHz and capable of boosted clock speeds up to 4GHz. It’s paired with 16GB of 2,400MHz DDR4 RAM. In the demanding Expert Reviews 4K benchmarks, the Gram scored 113 in the image-editing test, 75 in the video test and 60 in multitasking. Tally up the scores and the Gram reaches an overall result of 74 – a decent effort for a laptop this skinny and light.

As for real-world usage, I didn’t have any issues with the Gram’s performance when tackling heavy-duty applications such as Adobe Photoshop, and temperatures were comfortably low through the lightweight casing.

You can even squeeze out the odd game or two. In Dirt: Showdown, the Gram managed an average of 35fps at native (Full HD) resolution with the graphics settings switched to Medium. Up the quality, however, and the Gram struggles to produce reliable frame rates.

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Storage speeds are slightly disappointing. The 1TB M.2 SATA SSD in our review unit produced sequential read and write speeds of 499MB/s and 427MB/s according to the AS SSD benchmark. These are far from the fastest speeds I’ve encountered, especially for a PCIe SSD.

Thankfully, it’s a much better story when it comes to battery life. In our video rundown test – with the display set to 170cd/m2 and airplane mode engaged – the Gram managed an impressive 11hrs and 23mins before needing a recharge. That’s miles better than its similar-specced competitors; LG is certainly doing something right.

LG Gram review: Verdict

It isn’t faultless, but the Gram is a worthy large-screened ultraportable, giving you all the advantages of the form factor without the usual back-wrecking, shoulder-aching weight. Its 15.6in display is as accurate as the very best professional-grade monitors, it lasts up to two days on a single charge, and performance is as good as many other modern laptops. Squeeze all that inside the lightest 15in laptop to date, and the Gram is a surefire success.