There aren’t many such laptops out there, designed to bundle a large display in a portable and lightweight format. In fact, the Gram 17 is the lightest 17-inch laptop currently available in stores, at under 3 lbs (1.3 kilos). They always fall short for their price tag, still with underwhelming specs that truly matter on a portable-first device, still sacrifice too much performance and heat dissipation and require 2000€ or more for the bare minimum RAM (32GB) and SSD (1TB) required for productive work. Think of a super-compact light laptop and most people’s thoughts will drift towards the MacBook Air, and rightly so. As we said in our review, why buy anything else? It’s a lovely little machine and a powerful one, too. However, the M1 model is 100g heavier than the Gram and the new M2, although lighter, only matches the Gram’s heft, despite it only having a 13.3in display. At the same time, it only offers the performance of a smaller ultrabook, and is in fact outmatched by many of these modern 13 and 14-inch units, mostly because LG use a common internal design between all their Grams, thus the space in this 17-inch chassis is not fully utilized. That means this Gram 17 is mostly suited for daily tasks and multitasking, but not for serious workloads or for gaming. Our sample also came poorly calibrated, with a skewed Gamma and White Point. It ended up OK in terms of uniformity once calibrated, with only variations in luminosity in the corners. I did notice a little bit of light bleeding in the top-right corner on this unit, while the Gram 17 panel experienced none, despite being a little brighter.

On High, we’re looking at 15-22W of power with fan noise around 37-38dB and CPU temperatures in the mid-70s and to mid-80s C. With no external speaker grilles, I wasn’t expecting great things from the Gram 16’s 2 x 1.5W sound system, despite the DTS:X Ultra certification, but I was pleasantly surprised with that, too. The 2021 has now been released and the latest model takes that recipe and refines it. It’s still the lightest 17in laptop you can buy and it’s an even more impressive machine than last year’s model. In fact, the only threat to its lightweight laptop crown comes from the new LG Gram 16, which is cheaper, even lighter and has a display that’s almost as big.As far as the competition goes, there’s the Gram 17 already mentioned, and the Acer Swift Edge, another lightweight 16-inch laptop. That’s built on AMD Ryzen U hardware, which I know some of you will love, but it’s also a low-power design with minimalist cooling, and it gets a 4K OLED screen and a 56 Wh battery. You’ll find all about it in our review. BTW, there’s also an OLED available in the updated 2023 LG Gram, though. On the regular Gram 17, fresh air comes inside through the bottom of the laptop, through the punctured intake grill. However, that intake grill is only partially open over the CPU and is covered over the fan and the heatpipe, in an effort to channel the air over the CPU, into the fan, and then out through the exhaust grill.

The Normal profile cuts the fan to around 31-32 dBA and 12-17W of sustained power. The CPU runs cooler in this mode, fluctuating between 70 and 85 degrees Celsius. The performance takes a dip, though, around 20-25% lower than on High.

This design particularity is the reason thermals are not significantly improved when placing the laptop on a raiser stand, as it would if the fan would have been allowed unrestrained air access through the intake grill. Next, here are some benchmark results. We ran the entire suite of tests and benchmarks on the High profile on this Core i7-1260P configuration, with the screen set at its default QHD+ resolution. The LG Gram 17 gets a basic thermal module with a single fan and a short heatpipe, much like all the other past Gram. An updated thermal module is most likely available on the LG Gram 16 Pro with the RTX 2050 GPU, but that’s something we will discuss in a future article. All these negative aspects generally result from the fanatical struggle of marketers (and therefore engineers) with the weight of a laptop (this is a Gram series). A sturdy case with a magnesium alloy frame to support the motherboard and case strength (like the Thinkpad T+ series) will drastically add weight. A better cooling system (+1-2 massive heatpipes, bigger cooler and heatsinks) will drastically increase the weight. You complain about small speakers – big ones will add weight. Large battery (with no real fundamental progress in batteries) – will increase the weight drastically. Even +2 memory slots and a second M.2 (which might be placed near battery) will add weight. That is, all the shortcomings of this series stem from a key advantage – low weight.