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We’ve been testing out the LG Gram 14 for about a week now,
and it’s quickly become one of our favorite Windows laptops of all time
for 4 different reasons that I’m gonna be talking about in this review, but also has 2 problems.
We’ll talk about the pros and the cons that you should know about if you’re considering
buying one and how it compares to a few Windows laptops and also Apples M1 offering, and then
I’ll give you my conclusion if you should buy this laptop or not, so let’s get right into it!
Let's start out with the biggest feature, the weight. Even after spending a week with the Gram,
I’m still shocked by how lightweight it is each and every time I pick it up, it's almost surreal.
The weight is literally in the grams, not kilograms like most laptops, being 30 to
40% lighter than an XPS, MacBook Pro or Air, while having both a bigger battery and display.
There are some downsides though. The laptop is noticeably thicker than the others,
and not only because of the extra ports which could be blamed, but also because
of the thick lid even though the display isn’t a touchscreen that needs to be thicker.
With that, there is a ton of flex both in the lid and the body. I’ve never seen
this much in any laptop, even plastic ones that cost a few hundred dollars.
The body is made from thin magnesium alloy so its not plastic, but that doesn’t stop it from
feeling like plastic and a lot less premium than its biggest competitors that are made
from super solid aluminum and all of this brings me to a question.
Does being noticeably lighter in weight actually matter
if the laptop is thicker and ends up going into a backpack or a bag anyway, where the
weight difference isn’t noticeable? Let me know your thoughts down in the comments section.
Now let's focus on the other aspects, starting with
ports. The barrel plug from last year is gone and we now charge with USB-C
in either one of the two thunderbolt 4 ports that are on the left hand side.
LG included a 65watt brick but the gram can accept up to 100watts for faster charging,
and we also have a full size HDMI and a headphone jack. On the opposite end
we have a micro sd card slot, and two super speed standard usb ports which is extremely
rare for an ultrabook, especially one this lightweight, along with a kingston lock.
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Taking a look at the inside I have to praise how clean the gram looks, with larger keys and
trackpad this year, which are both very good. It's crazy how almost every laptop manufacturer
has really stepped up their game the last few years. I want to say the keyboard is class leading
because it's fantastic, but so are the Dell’s and Razors, same thing with the diving board trackpad.
The power button also doubles as a fingerprint scanner for easy and quick logins.
My only complaint is the chassis flex if you're clicking it towards the top,
because of this I just used the tap method and it was very accurate and responsive,
and although the finish feels plasticky a benefit is the surface is very fingerprint resistant.
Moving up to the display, there's a whole lot of good
and really only one issue. I’m so glad that 16x10 is finally mainstream in these small laptops,
the extra vertical space is really noticeable and useful. Its also noticeable that the LG’s
screen is 14” which doesn’t sound like much bigger than 13.3” but I can tell every time I open it.
I also love how bright this display is coming in at 500 nits, and LG claims it supports DCI-P3
wide colors with at least 95% accuracy as well. My only complaint is how reflective the display is.
For most people it won’t be an issue and will likely be better than their previous
laptop thanks to the high brightness, but if you’re trying to turn down the display to save
battery or your outside or even in a room with behind you it's definitely noticeable,
and because of that contrast is also worst than a MacBook Pro.
This doesn’t make sense since LG is literally one of the biggest and best display manufacturers,
and Dell's XPS has an almost identical display
but it's actually even less reflective than the MacBook Pro.
As for resolution, we only have one option, a 1080P based screen which is noticeably less
sharp than a 2.6K or 4K display in a Mac or XPS but it will work for most and definitely benefits
battery life which we’ll talk about in just a bit.
Above the display we have a 720P Webcam which is a standard spec but it doesn’t tell you much. When
we actually look at the video quality it's quite dark and dull looking, and while the microphone is
really loud, clarity is also lower than average, here's how it is compares to the M1 MacBook Air.
And now lets get another downside out of the way, the speakers. They are also louder than average
like the microphone, but they are also very flat. If you’re going to listen to a podcast or a simple
video it will be fine, but if you want to listen to music or watch movies they do disappoint.
Go ahead and take a listen:
And now let's talk about performance, I want to start with the SSD which is one of the fastest
I’ve seen in an ultrabook, with even the 256GB Model basically hitting 3000MB/s where most 256GB
windows laptops run at half the speed and you need to buy a 1TB version to get really fast speeds.
With that, the ssd is not soldered which is becoming the standard with ultrabooks, and to
make things even better LG gives us a whole nother M.2 SSD slot that is unused so you can add another
ssd later without having to replace the original one which is a huge selling point for the GRAM.
The absolute biggest benefit of the LG Gram is
that the performance does not drop AT ALL when you unplug it.
This is not the case with many of the Windows laptops out there,
which lose drastic amounts of performance when unplugged, even ultrabooks like the XPS 13.
On top of that, the other thing I really like is that the fans
don’t get crazy loud, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.
It’s very nice if you’re doing a lot of tasks that need a quick and short burst of power,
like for a couple of minutes, so you don't have to
deal with a huge spike in fan noise like you get with the XPS or Razer.
It's probably the quietest windows ultrabook that I’ve ever used,
However, LG’s focus on low fan noise unfortunately kills performance for longer-term workflows
and even some shorter tasks because they are choosing to limit frequency and wattage to
keep the system cool enough instead of ramping up the fans and this is software locked as well.
Taking a look at the 11th gen i5 performance, it comes up quite short of the XPS 13 with the
same i5 CPU in Geekbench 5 because of wattage limits that LG put in
resulting in a 15% performance difference.
In terms of single core the performance is very close, so you won’t tell a difference in simple
tasks like opening apps and web browsing, and you’ll benefit from a quieter system.
Now when we push the limits of the cpu the difference is substantial,
about 23% even though they use the same exact tiger lake chip.
What does this mean in the real world? Well we exported 50 edited 42MP raw images from
lightroom classic and the LG took 4 min and 43 seconds compared to 3min 11 seconds with the XPS.
Thankfully as far as graphics, the performance is practically the same for mixed tasks in
Geekbench 5 and for gaming in GFX bench it actually was slightly higher,
but when we combine CPU and GPU tasks like when video editing it takes 30 min
to export a 5min 4K project in premiere pro while the XPS takes less than 20min.
As you noticed I haven’t been talking about the new M1 MacBook performance
because most windows laptop shoppers will want to stick with a windows machine,
but that same 5min 4K test finished in less than 10 min while staying about as quiet as the LG.
Now LG does offer the 14” Gram with an i7 processor if you need more performance,
but that i7 only reaches the level of an i5 in a dell XPS 13, so if you care
about performance more than portability and quietness then I would skip the LG.
The other thing we haven’t talked about is battery life and that's a major strongsuite
of the gram for 2 reasons. The first is directly related to the CPU power being
limited so the wattage stays down, and the second is the really large
batter for such a small laptop, coming in at 72wh where the Dell has a 52wh.
Pairing this with a 1920x1200 display results in a solid 9 hours of real world mixed battery
life, a far cry from the up to 25 hours they advertise, but better than the 7 hours you
can get with an XPS with the same display resolution or about 5 with a 4K display.
Overall, if you’re looking for a great all around windows ultrabook for regular us the LG delivers,
but if you need performance check our our reviews of the XPS or RazerBook.
I’ll link both videos along with links to my recommended machined in the description below.
The other option is buying an M1 MacBook Air, which is cheaper and faster and doesn’t have some
of the downsides of the gram. Check out my full comparison right over there, and click above to
subscribe to see more videos like this one. This has been Max and I’ll see you in the next video!