HWM Singapore – August 2019

Thekeyboardispleasanttotype

onbutLGcouldhavemadethe

trackpadlarger.

Thegram 17 istheonlymember
ofthegramlineuptofeature
USB-CThunderbolt3 ports.

smaller13-inchdisplay.

It’sfairtosaythatthe

gram 17 tradesperformance

forportability.Whileother

17-inchnotebooksaremore

powerful,theyarealsofar

heavier,bulkier,andhave

8.0/10

TESTED & RATED

SINGAPORE

poor battery life. Whether

or not the trade-off is worth

it is down to your needs.

Unless you often  nd

yourself doing really heavy

workloads like video editing

or 3D graphics design, you’d

 nd the gram 17 to be

suffi cient for most duties.

Certainly, it is just about as

capable as any ultraportable.

Moreover, you have the

option to increase storage

and memory size.

In the end, the gram 17’s

specialty is really its weight.

It off ers a substantially larger

display — nearly 80% more

in outright screen area —

with no increase in weight

over much smaller 13-,

14-inch notebooks. If you

have always wanted a larger

notebook but stayed away

because of the associated

weight, the gram 17 is

practically a godsend.

CONCLUSION

Anengineeringmarvel,a 17-inch

thatonlyweighsasmuchasmost

13-inchultraportables!

frame-buff ering. Another

component hampering

performance is its slower

SATA-based SSD. Most

ultraportables these days

have dual-channel memory

and are equipped with much

faster PCIe-based SSDs.

Battery life, however, is

excellent and the gram

17 lasted over 7.5 hours

when running a variety

of productivity workloads

at full brightness. To put

that number into context,

that’s only an hour less

than the HP Spectre X360, a

notebook with comparable

speci cations but a much

Speaking of the display,
it uses an IPS panel and
has a resolution of 2,560
x 1,600 pixels and a 16:10
aspect ratio, which translates
to more vertical space. In
practice, what this means
is that you can see more
of a website, document,
spreadsheet or project work
at a glance. The display is
suffi ciently vibrant and gets
quite bright. However, it is
also incredibly glossy and
prone to glare and re ection.
The gram 17 is only
off ered in a single
con guration and it comes
with a quad-core Core i7-

it runs in single-channel

mode, resulting in negative

performance impact,

particularly on graphics-

intensive workloads as the

integrated GPU has to rely

on system memory for

ATA GLANCE

PROCESSOR

IntelCorei7-8565U

MEMORY

8GB

STORAGE

512GB

PRICE

$2,799

underperformed against

other ultraportables with

similar speci cations. This

is because only one of

its two SO-DIMM slots is

occupied. Consequently,

8565U processor, 8GB of
memory, and 512GB SSD.
This con guration should
serve most users adequately
but I think a handful of users
would want more memory
and possibly more storage.
Fortunately, the gram 17
can be upgraded, since it
uses standard M.2 SSDs and
SO-DIMM memory slots, but
users would need to make a
trip down to the LG service
center if you do not want to
void your warranty.
Performance is not the
gram 17’s strong suit. In
benchmarks, it consistently

AUGUST 2019 | HWM 67