LG Gram 17 2022 Review: Having a lightweight laptop is not enough!

The LG Gram 2022 thin and light laptop series has been officially launched with three familiar variants, which include LG Gram 14 2022, LG Gram 16 2022, and LG Gram 17 2022 with 3 screen sizes of 14 inches, 16 inches, and 17 inches, respectively. The highlight of the LG Gram laptop 2022 is equipped with the latest 12th generation Intel Alder Lake processor, DDR5 RAM, PCIe 4.0 SSD, and is still extremely lightweight.

LG Gram 17 2022 Review: Having a lightweight laptop is not enough!

Since its inception in 2015, LG’s Gram series has always followed a lightweight laptop computers philosophy. Indeed, its light weight has always surprised one when holding and experiencing the Gram laptop model in hand. Despite having a 17-inch widescreen in the laptop world, especially in the LG Gram versions, the LG Gram 17 2022 still retains an incredible weight of 1.35 kilograms, which is as heavy as a 13-inch laptop.

With the Gram 17 2022, LG continues to maintain its thin and light tradition but adds more power factors with a series of the latest equipment today like Intel 12 Alder Lake CPUs, DDR5 RAM, and PCIe 4.0 SSD, besides high-end screen quality and long battery life.

Design

With LG Gram 17 2022 version, its design is almost the same as the 2021 generation. It is still a square, minimalist design, with only a modest Gram logo in the middle of the outer shell. The weight of the LG Gram laptop is similar to the 2021 generation with the figure of 1.35Kg, still the lightest 17-inch laptop today. While, the thickness is also at 17.7mm, slightly thinner than last year’s model (17.8mm).

LG Gram 17 2022 Review: Having a lightweight laptop is not enough!

In practical everyday use, the compactness of the LG Gram 2022 17 offers many benefits. The large screen and ultra-light size make you feel like carrying a “mobile office” with you. The weight of the laptop is spread evenly across the body, making this laptop feel even more lightweight. There is no difficulty in holding the device with one hand and in the other and typing for long periods.

The hinge of the LG laptop is sturdy, allowing the screen to be opened easily with one hand and even the option to open the screen is always very convenient to turn on the device. The coupling details in the hinge area have also been processed by LG to be a tight, seamless, and no longer gap like in previous generations.

The Magnesium Carbon Nano alloy shell still feels like plastic to the touch even though the laptop is very solid and sturdy. Many durability tests have shown that Gram is durable and can withstand strong impacts. Gram 17 2022 continues to achieve the military standard MIL-ST-810 durability after passing 7 tests of shock, impact, low pressure, high/low temperature, dust, vibration, or frost.

The connection ports of the Gram 17 2022 are still quite rich, enough for most common needs. On the left side are 2 USB 4 Gen3x2 Type C Thunderbolt 4 ports (can be used for charging, data transfer, image output, and audio), 1 3.5mm headphone/mic combo jack, and 1 HDMI 2.0 port.

The right side has two more USB-A 3.2 Gen 2×1 ports, a microSD card slot, and a Kensington lock. With wireless connectivity, LG Gram 17 2022 fully supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1.

Display

With the screen size being as big as 17 inches, the user experience on the Gram 17 2022 can be summed up in 2 words “eye-catching”. All the content is very spacious and easy to arrange software on the desktop. For enhanced multitasking capabilities, slim bezels and an innovative hinge are concealed to give the impression that the screen is equally thin on all four sides, providing content with an open look.

LG Gram 17 2022 Review: Having a lightweight laptop is not enough!

As a technology company that can produce screen panels on its own, LG also equips the Gram 17 2022 with “homegrown” panels from the LG Display division. Specs of “not-so” screen with 2.5K high-resolution IPS panel (2560×1600 pixels), 350 nit brightness, 1200:1 contrast ratio, meeting 99% of the DCI-P3 color gamut with anti-reflective coating glare. The screen has no touch (LG Gram has a 2-in-1 line, optional touchscreen), and because it is not aimed at the gaming audience, the refresh rate stops at a basic 60Hz.

Last year, LG marked the conversion of all its Gram laptops to the new 16:10 screen ratio, and the LG Gram 2022 series continues to inherit this new ratio. With a 16:10 screen that is more square than the traditional 16: 9 ratio, the Gram 17 2022 proves to be especially suitable for office jobs, working with documents, sheets, and web content.

The screen offers high sharpness, good brightness, and natural colors and displays accurate colors, usable in photo editing and semi-professional video post-production.

Features

In terms of sound, with 2x 1.5W speakers placed on the bottom of the laptop, the Gram 17 2022 gives a not-so-impressive sound quality, the volume is loud, but it will mainly be the treble and mid-range, without the presence of bass. The speakers on the device are suitable for light, lyrical music, or podcast shows. If you focus on sound quality, Bluetooth headphones or speakers will be a more reasonable choice.

LG Gram 17 2022 Review: Having a lightweight laptop is not enough!

The big improvement on the Gram 2022’s webcam is that the resolution is increased to Full HD, including an infrared sensor for Windows Hello face unlock. Face unlock speed is very agile, even in the dark, so the lack of a fingerprint sensor integrated with the power button like in the 2021 life is no longer a big problem.

The 2MP Full HD 1080p webcam offers significantly better definition than the popular 1MP HD webcams on today’s laptops, but the white balance is still not very standard, slightly greenish. The laptop has 2 mics integrated with AI Noise Cancelation technology that works effectively, significantly filtering environmental noise such as passing traffic.

LG Gram 17 2022 Review: Having a lightweight laptop is not enough!

In particular, on the Gram 17 2022, LG also integrates the LG Glance by Mirametrix toolkit, which provides anti-peeping capabilities, automatically dims the screen, and displays an alert when it detects that someone is looking over your shoulder. This feature will be very helpful when you are working with sensitive or confidential documents and do not want others to see them.

The LG Glance by Mirametrix tool uses the laptop’s Full HD webcam to detect faces, so it also offers many other useful features, such as when you turn your face away, not looking at the screen, the device will automatically dim the screen, If you leave the device for 30 seconds, it will also be locked automatically, music and videos will be automatically paused. When using 2 monitors, you look at any screen, the mouse pointer will automatically switch to that screen, and dim the other screen…. and many more other useful features.

Keyboard and touchpad

The keyboard and touchpad are the points LG has done well on the Gram 2021 generation, so it’s not surprising that the company has no changes for the 2022 generation. Still a full-size keyboard with Numpad convenient for entering numbers. The typing feel was super fast with a deep and smooth key travel, without emitting any significant noise. The 2-level backlight system is bright enough to work well at the night without turning on additional desk lights.

However, a few small things from the 2021 generation have not been overcome by LG, such as the Numlock key located right next to the backspace, so it is easy to press the wrong button, and the left and right navigation keys are still a bit small.

The touchpad is huge, supporting multi-point scrolling, zooming, switching apps, or moving forward and backward smoothly, enough to meet almost all basic operations without using an external mouse.

Performance

LG Gram 2022 has many different configuration versions, and our LG Gram 17 2022 review unit has specific configurations as below:

  • CPU: 12th generation Intel Core i7 – 1260P Alder Lake 12 cores 16 threads base clock speed 2.1GHz and can be boosted to 4.7GHz, base TDP 28W and can go up to 64W
  • GPU: Intel Iris Xe graphics card up to 1.4GHz, 96 EU
  • Memory: 32GB LPDDR5 5200 MHz Dual Channel hard soldering
  • Storage: 2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs, 1x 1TB drive and 1x 256GB drive

It is currently the highest configuration option of LG Gram 17 2022. Obviously, at this configuration, we still do regular office tasks such as browsing the web to look up information with a few dozen tabs, opening Photoshop and Lightroom in parallel to edit photos, and switching the apps on the Gram 17 2022 were super smooth. Even when trying out popular eSport games like League of Legends or CS: GO, the device still plays well.

The Gram 17 2022 stumbled a bit when we tried to edit the 4K 30p video in full playback on Premiere Pro. But when we did the playback level ½, everything started playing smoothly again.

The benchmark score of LG Gram 17 2022 on familiar benchmark software is also very impressive, especially in the PCIe 4.0 SSD system with reading speeds of up to nearly 6.5GB/s and write speeds of up to 5GB/s. S. The LDDR5 5200MHz RAM and the Intel Gen 12 i7 1260P CPU also give the top scores today.

The upgradeability of Gram 17 2022 is also more limited when now that the RAM has been soldered to the board, it cannot be further upgraded, so you should choose the version with as much RAM as possible for long-term use. Anyway, it is still a rare thing and the best lightweight laptop model with up to 2 PCIe 4.0 SSD slots, so you can choose a version with a moderate storage capacity, about 256GB, and then buy an external SSD to attach when needed.

However, high temperature is still a problem, and Gram 17 2022 hasn’t fixed it yet. For super lightweight and compactness, LG has to sacrifice a heat dissipation system when there is only 1 copper pipe, a small fan, and a limited air intake system. Therefore, when running heavy tasks, the CPU temperature is usually in the range of 90–91 °C, and the pulse often needs to be reduced to cool the device.

Battery life

LG is one of the pioneers in equipping a large-capacity battery on laptops, and the Gram 17 2022 continues to promote this with a large 80Wh battery, equivalent to the 2021 generation. LG announced an operating time of up to 17.5 hours, but of course, this number is when the device only plays offline videos, has 150 nit screen brightness (about 40%), turns off WiFi, Bluetooth, and plugs in headphones.

We can get up to 8 hours of battery life on the Gram 17 2022 by turning on battery saving mode in Windows 11, but the screen brightness has to be kept around 50%, WiFi was turned on, mainly for tasks like editing may be used. Or edit the document in MS Word, and browse the web with about 10 tabs open on Firefox. That’s still a pretty decent battery life, especially when considering laptops with bigger screens like the Gram 17. This battery life is enough for a normal working day, and we don’t have to worry about charging the laptop while we’re out.

The charger that comes with a 65W capacity is also very compact, and can fully charge the battery for the device in about 2 hours. In addition, you can also use power banks that support the PD standard with an output power of about 45W or more to be able to charge the battery for laptops.

Final line

The LG Gram 17 2022 is almost “unmatched” in the thin and light 17-inch laptop segment. Most of Gram’s competitors in this segment, such as the Dell XPS 17 or MacBook Pro 16, weigh about 2 kg or more, which is one and a half times heavier than LG’s representative. The advantage of the Gram’s compactness is an attractive factor for those especially interested in mobility, which often have to move and prefer larger-screen laptops.

Of course, thinness also has its price when you have to make a little sacrifice in terms of power and heat dissipation. Although the highest configuration of the LG Gram 17 2022 can handle most tasks, including video editing, it will be difficult to match the smoothness with a heavy 17-inch laptop. Apart from the Gram 17 variant, you can also consider the Gram 16 or Gram 14 options with a significantly lower starting price, but still completely inheriting the compactness, longer battery life, and screen quality.

LG Gram 17 2022 price and availability

LG Gram 17 2022 17Z90Q model pricing starts from $1,696.99 / £1,649, and it can be purchased through Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk websites.

About Ankeet Solanki

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One comment

  1. Nice review.
    Can you add some graphs from HWINFO showing CPU temperatures, clocks, wattages
    when laptop sits idle and when is under load?

    How often fans kick in when browsing internet? Are they loud?

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