LG Gram SuperSlim 15.6 OLED review: Lighter than a loaf of bread

Making a laptop that’s small and light is easy. Making a laptop thin and strong isn’t too taxing either. But making a laptop light, thin and still full-size, now that’s more of a challenge. In recent years, LG has been leading the way in the quest for ever lighter laptops with its Gram range of machines, for example, the recent LG Gram 17.

Taking things to their extreme is the LG Gram SuperSlim, which has now been updated for 2024 with Intel Core Ultra silicon and a rather impressive – for a 15.6in laptop – sub-1kg weight.

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LG Gram SuperSlim 15.6 OLED review: What you need to know

Let’s get one thing straight from the get-go. If you are the sort of person who abuses their tech, the LG Gram SuperSlim may not be the ideal gadget for you. Sit on it, and it will certainly bend and, quite probably, break. If you tend to hammer the keys while you type, the bouncy keyboard deck may start to get on your wick. This is a laptop for the more genteel user.

The rather ephemeral exterior nevertheless conceals an impressive level of standard kit with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU running the show backed up by 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and not one, but two 1TB SSDs. That’s an impressive level of basic specification for any laptop, let alone one aimed at the sort of person who begrudges every ounce of superfluous weight and every millimetre of unnecessary bulk in their luggage.

LG Gram SuperSlim 15.6 OLED review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, Intel Arc Graphics GPU, 32GB RAM, 2 x 1TB SSD, 15.6in, 60Hz, 1,920 x 1,080 OLED display; Price when reviewed: £1,349 inc VAT

In the UK, the 2024 LG Gram SuperSlim comes in a couple of different versions, with the differentiators being the RAM, SSD and price. Our review model has a pair of 1TB SSDs inside and 32GB of RAM for £1,509 while the other, cheaper model has a single 1TB drive and 16GB of RAM and costs £1,349. Both machines come with the Core Ultra 7 155H CPU and a 15.6in Full HS OLED screen.

If you’ve got that sort of money burning a hole in your pocket and are after an ultralight laptop there are naturally several other machines worth your consideration:

• The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 15in is the best of the new Snapdragon-powered CoPilot+ Windows laptops. It’s one of the most easily repairable laptops on the market, has a great 2.5K IPS touchscreen and epic battery life. It’s heavier than the LG Gram but more expensive for the same specification at cheaper at just £1,749.
• If you want an Apple MacBook Air with the same size screen, 1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM you’ll pay £1,899 for the privilege and have a machine that weighs a leaden 1.24kg. Luckily, the entry-level model is only £1,160, however it comes with half the RAM and a quarter the storage.
• The Huawei MateBook X Pro is an exceptional laptop. Performance is outstanding, the 14.2in 3K OLED screen is supremely accurate and the whole thing weighs just 980g. The Core Ultra 7 model is now available for just £1,499.
• Arguably the prettiest laptop on the market the Asus Zenbook S 14 (UX5406) weighs just 1.2kg and has incredible battery life, thanks to Intel’s newest 200V series chipset. Starting at just £1,100 it’s solid value.

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LG Gram SuperSlim 15.6 OLED review: Design and build quality

• Weighs a mere 820g
• A little bendy
• Three Thunderbolt 4 ports

Made from a mixture of magnesium and plastic, the SuperSlim is all about the weight, or rather the lack of it. According to LG the SuperSlim weighs 980g but according to my calibrated scales, it weighs only 820g, which is ludicrously light for a full-sized laptop. And full-sized the gram SuperSlim certainly is, boasting a conventional 16:9 15.6in display and a numeric keypad.

Granted, the selection of ports is more befitting an ultra-compact. There’s just three Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4.0 specification USB-C ports – two on the left and one on the right – which all boast support for Power Delivery and DisplayPort output – and a 3.5mm audio jack, but then the SuperSlim is only between 10.9mm and 12.5mm thick.

The lightweight and slender profile comes at a price, though. The SuperSlim does not feel particularly solid or robust. The lid may not be any more wobbly than some other slim’n’lights thanks to its unlaminated screen, but the body feels decidedly rickety.

Apply even a moderate amount of torque to the body and you can hear and feel it flex. I don’t think it would take an unusually strong person to rupture the body terminally and break it in two.

Of course that’s taking things to their extreme. In everyday use, I can’t see the SuperSlim coming to any harm and the design has passed seven of the MIL-STD-810H standard tests so it hasn’t got an entirely glass jaw.

Given the emphasis on reduced weight and profile, there quite literally isn’t any room for design fripperies. This has resulted in a rather plain and dour design, not helped by the sombre Neptune Blue colourway.

I can’t tell you how easy the Gram SuperSlim is to open up because all the screws are covered either with rubber feet or blanking plates, which would make taking it apart a highly intrusive procedure.

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LG Gram SuperSlim 15.6 OLED review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

• Keyboard deck is bouncy
• Excellent layout and agreeable typing action
• Good, if rather dim, 1080p webcam

The keyboard is both shallow and bouncy. Press down on the H-key and you’ll feel a good few millimetres of give in the deck and keyboard mounting. To be honest, if you press down anywhere away from the edges you’ll feel the deck give under your fingers.

The keys themselves have a decent typing action with a couple of millimetres of travel and a positive end stop. The layout is hard to fault with a three-column numeric keypad, Fn-lock and two-level white backlight. The arrow keys are all half-height but that’s hardly an uncommon issue with modern laptops.

At 110 x 70mm, the mechanical touchpad is a little on the small side but its plastic surface is smooth and pleasant to the touch, while the click-action is quick, sharp and not too loud.

The 1080p webcam is a little dim but still crisp and colourful and it comes with a selection of Windows Studio Effects AI image enhancements. It also supports Windows Hello IR facial recognition.

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LG gram SuperSlim 15.6 OLED review: Display and audio

• Bright and colourful OLED panel
• Refresh rate limited to 60Hz
• Tuneful speakers

The 15.6in 1,920 x 1,080 Samsung-made OLED screen has the basics well in hand. With a peak brightness level of 410cd/m2 in SDR mode and 617cd/m2 in HDR mode (measured on a 10% window; at full screen, the brightness level drops to 430cd/m2) and excellent gamut volumes of 161.4% sRGB, 114.3%DCI-P3 and 111.2% Adobe RGB, it’s as bright and colourful as any other OLED laptop display on the market.

The main disappointment is that the refresh rate is limited to 60Hz, a shame given most of the competition uses displays running at 90Hz or 120Hz.

After a couple of updates, two colour profiles appeared in the Windows settings called LG OLED Mode and LG Colour Profile DCI-P3. The latter appeared closer to the standard Display P3 profile than DCI-P3, registering a Delta E variance of 1.7 rather than 4.4.

The OLED Mode setting, meanwhile, presents over-saturated colours giving the display that hyper-realistic OLED look that many casual users like.

The screen itself has a gloss finish that can be rather reflective and lacks a touch interface, which at the price seems a little mean. The screen also lacks an official HDR certification but I was wholly satisfied with the HDR performance.

Given that the size and shape of the SuperSlim places very real restrictions on the size of the audio components the sound system does a good job. I’m writing this listening to the debut album from NewDad and the SuperSlim is perfectly up to the job.

I wouldn’t describe the volume levels as room-filling, with only 72dBA available as measured against a pink-noise source at a 1m distance, but the sound is detailed and full with an acceptable amount of bass. Even at maximum volume, there’s not even a hint of distortion.

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LG gram SuperSlim 15.6 OLED review: Performance and battery life

• Outstanding battery life
• Thermal management issues limit performance
• Intel’s Arc integrated GPU continues to impress

Thermal management was the Achilles’ heel of the 2023 LG Gram 17. This issue endures with the SuperSlim 15.6 because there’s only so much the single, small fan and single heat pipe can do to shift hot air from the inside to the outside.

This is reflected in the SuperSlim’s score in our 4K multi-media benchmark: 178 points is exactly half the 356 the Acer Swift Go 14 scored using the same chipset. Running the system under stress quickly revealed the problem; while the GPU was happy to run at 100% utilisation, the CPU quickly dropped to around 25%. Comparing the CineBench R23 multi-core results tells a similar story with the LG scoring 7,084 to the Acer’s 11,267.

The LG pulls its socks up when it comes to graphics performance thanks to the Arc integrated GPU. It ran the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling test at an average of 19fps and while that’s well shy of what even a low-power discrete GPU can achieve, it’s still a useable level of performance and far better than you’ll get from the Iris Xe integrated GPU on Core i-based laptops.

Of course, this doesn’t write the SuperSlim off. It’s not designed as a high-power workhorse and the M2 MacBook Air only scored 217 points in our 4K test which suggests a broadly similar level of day-to-day performance. But I am concerned that people may buy the SuperSlim expecting a certain level of performance from the Core Ultra 7 CPU and just not get it.

On the flipside, both of the Hynix SSDs in the SuperSlim turned in impressive, and near-identical, levels of performance with sequential read and write speeds of 5,148MB/s and 3,086MB/s respectively.

And the laptop also returned superb battery life results, as well. In our video rundown test, the SuperSlim’s 60Wh battery lasted 14hrs 15mins. That’s MacBook Air-matching stamina and it comes close to matching some of the recently launched Qualcomm-powered CoPilot Plus Windows laptops, too.

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LG gram SuperSlim 15.6 OLED review: Verdict

Given my experiences with previous LG Gram laptops, I wasn’t entirely surprised by the LG Gram SuperSlim 15.6 OLED’s three main failings, namely the slightly fragile build, bouncy deck and the thermal limiting on CPU performance. I take them all as the price you pay for a laptop that weighs less than a large Warburtons Toastie sliced loaf.

No matter the limitations imposed by the 820g weight of the SuperSlim, it still stands as a remarkable achievement. LG has built a full-sized laptop here with a more-than-decent specification, that’s so slim and light that you can genuinely forget you’re carrying about with you. There is no other laptop quite like it.