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In this article, I give you my LG Gram 17-inch (2021) review with specs included. This is a big laptop and weight can be a big issue for 17-inch laptops. But, that’s not such an issue here. The LG Gram is an ultra-thin lightweight laptop.

In the first quarter of every year, usually closer to January, LG refreshes the Gram model laptops and they get better and better every year. And so, this is the culmination of several years of this model, a 17-inch thin and light ultrabook.

Gram is also available in a 16-inch (because 16 inch is the new 15-inch), and 14-inch sizes.

I think the 14-inch is probably less exciting for people because there’s a lot of very light 14-inch laptops these days, but the 16-inch may be the sweet spot for many. But, the 17-inch is still quite fascinating.

The main appeal here is having a really big display but the latest Intel 11th gen ultrabook made better now with a WQHD+ (Which means 16 by 10 aspect ratio which is the new “in” thing) display that’s really gorgeous.

The display has full DCI-P3 coverage which is great for watching movies and also for photo editing and content creation. Personally, it’s one of my favorite displays when it comes to laptops.

LG Gram 17-inch for the year 2021 is the next step in the evolution of the Gram line. The 17-inch model weighs 2.98 pounds (which is 1.35 kilograms). The 16-inch is around 2.62 pounds (1.19 kg) and the 14-inch is even lighter.

If you get the 17-inch or the 16-inch you get a keyboard with a number pad. The keyboard has always been pretty good on the Grams, especially considering how thin and light they are. It’s even better now, it’s so tactile and crisp.

They increased the key travel a little bit on this keyboard (it’s 1.6 millimeters). It just feels good white back lighting. And well on our model which is black very easy to see the white key contrast but we’ve had the silver models in the past which is still available more like a dark gray it’s still quite visible.

Very large glass track pad onboard. Microsoft precision as you would expect that’s good. The design has changed a little bit it’s a bit more absolutely rectangular. The curves on the corners are a little bit less. You might think that’s a minutia right but it looks really clean and minimalist and modern.

Again particularly i think in the black which does show some fingerprints like all black laptops. It’s magnesium alloy that’s how they get it so light. But unlike a lot of very light laptops this one has less flex. I’m not telling you it’s absolutely super duper crazy rigid like a dell xps 15 or something but it’s not flimsy and flexy and scary despite the fact that when you pick it up you think this must be a fake laptop from IKEA or something because it’s so light.

We have until 11th gen inside so sorry no amd for your amd lovers there. But this is the latest intel quad core cpu for ultrabooks inside. You can get with core i5s and core i7s a little bit more of a focus on the corey 7 because this is a premium sort of product.

And it has intel iris xe graphics which was a nice improvement for intel for the 11th gen where you could actually play older and casual games without having a gaming laptop. Not a gaming laptop this though. Even if it is a incher. I think the display is really the centerpiece of this laptop though.

The 16 by 10 aspect ratio is nice if you’re doing content consumption and watching videos. In other words you’re going to have black bars on the top and bottom. Not huge but they’ll be there. But it’s nice for people who are doing content creation which lg’s focusing on this year.

So you’ve got more height to work with which is nice. If you’re doing video editing or photo editing and you’ve got photoshop palettes floating around and all that sort of thing. To be precise last year’s 17 inch model also had the same 16 by 10 aspect ratio display. But the smaller models did not.

They were just the usual 16 by nine. So now all the size models have that same 16 by 10 aspect ratio display. Wider gamma too. I mean the the gram displays have always been very nice. You kind of look at it you just want to sit down and watch a movie on netflix or something.

But even more so now. But the fact that we’ve got full dci p3 coverage is great for video editors and for content consumers because that’s pretty much standard for wide gamut video. For photography you’ve still got pretty good adobe rgb coverage for print photography i should say.

You can see the metrics on screen obviously if you’re doing photography for the web then srgb is all you care about which is also covered in full. It’s a nice display good contrast good black levels too on this ips display. Um the only thing is that it’s glossy. And this is a non-touch display.

Now it’s not that achy kind of glossy that looks like it’s not laminated you know like it looks like this plate glass over a display or something it looks quite laminated and not weird or anything like that. But it’s very shiny. So if that’s an issue given the environments you use your laptop and very bright or something it’s something you do want to keep in mind.

Also ours is non-touch and as far as i’ve seen it looks like they’re rolling mostly with non-touch. They do make convertible versions now too. So those obviously are both convertibles and touch screens. There’s that. In terms of performance until 11th gen quad-core cpus.

Performance is where we expect it’s not leading the pack though. Because lg clearly focused on making this pretty quiet and not too hot. So they could run the cpu hotter is what i’m trying to say but they don’t. And the integrated graphics on this.

It’s not a slouch it’s just not as fast as say the razer book which is on the fastest with intel 11th gen cpus inside for ultrabooks. As you might guess thus fan noise is not really much. And when you do hear it it’s not a very big fan so it’s more like a shh rather than a filling your room or something like that.

And to the touch it stays reasonably cool which is to say warm not burning hot not ouchy that sort of thing. Connectivity is pretty decent here. We have two thunderbolt four ports with usbc. So yep thunderball docks display out charging.

In fact this year finally we have a usbc charger instead of a proprietary barrel pin charger. Though to be fair the previous generation gram that came with the barrel pin charger could be charged with a USB-C charger too. We’ve got hdmi on board we got a micro-sd card slot.

Again the nod towards content creator types and of course a headphone jack. So port selection is pretty good for an ultrabook here. Sound is also pretty good the gram is never disappointed. I mean this is not oh my god 16 inch macbook pro level sound but the two stereo two-watt speakers sound pretty good.

And we have a 5 watt smart amp too to help improve audio quality and theory headphone quality as well. And as always this dcx ultra branded audio on board. Pricing on this this is a niche item. Obviously for those who want the most ultra light ultra portable laptop which in 2020 maybe not so much of a thing because we weren’t traveling much.

Maybe someday again and the second half of 2021 it will be a thing. Uh but even for those of you who just don’t want to wait a lot of weight on your legs when you’re working or whatever it is it’s fine. So you’re going to pay for that. Now the 14 inch starts the cheapest one at 9.99.

But that one is the only one you can get with the core i3 and that’s what you get for that price not so desirable. So i’m really more like 12.99. The 16 inch you can get a 13.99 configuration. That’s pretty appealing with the core i7 16 gigs of ram and a 256 gig SSD.

Or you could spend more and get more storage. Our 17-incher is the most expensive and pretty much it’s the full figured model. You don’t there’s no like slumming it with a core i3 sort of thing. So it’s it’s expensive it’s 17.99. You get a terabyte m.2 nvme ssd 16 gigs of ram and a core i7 cpu on board.

So yeah you’re going to pay for it. But what about the internals. A few things have changed we’re going to check that part out now. Okay nothing says passive aggressively that you can take the bottom cover off but you’re not going to have fun doing it like a whole lot of rubber feet.

Boy these are very big tall rubber feet that look like something i won’t mention. And beyond the rubber feet that are on the corners here we have little metal discs covering additional screw holes which are really annoying to get out.

They used to use rubber ones mostly because there’s very little area to pry and you don’t want to you know disturb the paint. Even a sim ejection tool is too fat to fit in the gap. So get a really tiny jeweler’s screwdriver flat head to do it.

And then you can take the cover off. Magnesium alloy there it is. And inside not a super lot you can do. Sadly the older lg grams had ram slots which was pretty exciting and unusual for ultrabooks. They are gone. We do have one teeny motherboard.

We have a lot of space right here which is quite interesting almost looks like room for a second fan. But no we have just one fan. Which would be standard for an ultrabook with integrated graphics. One thing that is nice though is we have two m.2 slots.

So to expand storage on this becomes obviously a lot easier there. And you don’t see two slots on ultrabooks all that often and they even include the screw there in case you want to add your second SSD in there. We have a one terabyte fast SSD and ours sk hynix which lately they’ve been putting out some good ssds.

The very obviously 80-watt-hour battery as they’ve always done with the big white cover on it is right there. Yeah there is plenty of space around all this um yeah. Speaker driver is right there down firing obviously. And the wi-fi card is soldered on in the upper corner here what looks like a separate board.

Though i feel like there’s board underneath here so maybe it’s just that’s covered in this. But that’s what you’ve got for your internals. So how about battery life. The gram is always done decently enough. Same 80 watt-hour battery that we’ve seen from previous generations. The 16-inch also has an 80-watt-hour battery.

The 14-inch has a 72-watt-hour battery. We’re going to speak of the 17-inch which is the one that we have with the 65-watt USB-C charger. And despite the fact that we’ve got the same battery capacity as the last generation intel 11th gen is more power frugal. So we are seeing a bit better run times here.

And i was managing nine to ten hours doing a mix of productivity some streaming video a little bit of photoshop with brightness set to 200 nits. Obviously, if you’re running it less bright or doing less demanding tasks or just streaming video the battery will last longer.

Likewise, if you’re playing Skyrim or something like that yeah your battery run times will be shorter. So that’s the insanely light as always lg graham for 2021. And again you get the idea i like it a lot. Of course, it’s a specialty item you have to really want something that’s not just thin but super duper light.

But if you do and you’re looking for ultrabook level performance and with a now 16 by 10 aspect ratio despite with wide gamut. Well you know it takes a lot of boxes and you’ve got thunderbolt 4 on board too. They’re doing the right thing sir i have to say.