Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave - Dee and this is our view of the LG gran so LG even making notebooks and ultrabooks for quite a few years but this is the first time they've pushed one into North America this one's really thin it's really light and it's geared toward someone who really wants like the true Ultrabook experience here's my review this laptop comes in a few different models and screen sizes but here are the specs of the unit I have it's a Broadwell Core i5 running at 2.2 gigahertz the 1080p IPS panel integrated HD 5500 graphics eight gigs of RAM 128 gigs of storage and the current retail price is just under $1000 now there's another model equipped with an i7 that's quite a bit more expensive and there's also a 13 inch model which comes in slightly cheaper but I think this one here is the one that gives you the best overall value when you open it up there's some protective foam on the top lid and you get the laptop along with a charger and an Ethernet dongle the top surface has a texture that's very similar to a macbook with that slightly textured finish and the bottom surface has a similar texture but the material feels a little more plastic II will come back to that the screen has a little bit of flex to it it's not super Wiggly or anything but I wish it was a little more sturdier the chassis in the keyboard area have a little less flex but it's still not as solid as I'd like the hinge mechanism seems sturdy enough it's covered in plastic but it's solid and how the bottom panel is something else it's really soft and flexible you can kind of see how much the panel is distorting as I move my finger around and I'm not sure what it's made of I mean LG says that they use carbon magnesium and lithium magnesium somewhere in these notebooks which sounds really space-aged and cool but build quality isn't top-tier on this thing going around the device on the left side we have the power socket a USB 3.0 port full size HDMI port which is kind of cool to see on a thin device like this and indicator lights on the right side we have a mic a micro SD slot that fits cards in pretty flush a micro USB port a second USB 3 port and a lock slot the micro USB port is for that Ethernet dongle base now I have mixed feelings about this microSD I mean it's great for transferring files if you have a smartphone that can take microSD cards but if you're a video or photo editor that uses regular sized SD cards you got to get an adapter and that's kind of a bummer the 40 watt AC adapter is small but the plug is pretty thin and narrow and I feel like it would be easy to bend or damage it so you want to be careful with that the LG Graham is thin it's as thin as a macbook air and thinner than an AC su x-303 so the length and the width of all three of these ultrabooks are very similar you can make like a perfect stack with them but the Graham has a 14 inch screen instead of a 13 inch screen like the other two and it's a lot lighter the keyboard types pretty well in terms of its space it's not bad and the arrow keys are positioned well the backspace key is a little shorter than what you might be used to and the keys aren't super clicky but overall it's pretty good my only real complaint though is the lack of backlighting I personally don't need it but I know a lot of people depend on backlighting and on a device at this price point you kind of expect it the trackpad is okay the texture is great buttons click well but again it's got tracking issues I mean every once in a while you get a stutter or some skipping it's just like that standard Windows trackpad the screen is a 1080p IPS panel it's a glossy screen but it isn't a touchscreen it's pretty bright and viewing angles are good color accuracy is okay we're getting 85% srgb and 63% of Adobe RGB it's also reasonably well calibrated out of the box maybe a touch green it's not the best screen I've seen on an ultrabook but it's still very respectable now keep in mind that it is a 14 inch screen in the footprint of a traditional 13-inch ultrabook so that extra inch is nice and it comes from these really narrow side bezels which measure in at around 7 millimeters the bezel on the top is a little thicker but it has a webcam shaped like a little gear which is cool and this is what it looks like the speakers are small and they fired downwards which I never liked but they don't sound bad and they get moderately loud here's what they sound like the Graham idols really quietly like less than 20 decibels on Idol when running on battery but even under load it's surprisingly quiet for device running a core i5 it measures in at low to mid 20s which is really nice but with the silence comes heat there is a fan and the exhaust vent is in the hinge but because that fan is so slow and quiet it gets really hot it was so hot that I was convinced that I could cook an egg on it and so I tried and I failed and removing it was a pain in the butt so I basically egged my laptop for this video now using the Fleur we can see it goes over 115 degrees but apparently I needed 130 degrees to cook the egg so they're really quiet noise signature of this device has its trade-offs I'm not really concerned about the device being damaged because these Broadwell chips can handle way hotter temperatures but with extra heat you get CPU throttling and that's never good it's running an SSD and read speeds are okay we're getting over 500 Meg's per second but write speeds are pretty slow at 150 megabytes per second you won't really notice slow write speeds for most regular stuff like media consumption light work and gaming but video edits are pretty sluggish I'd stay away from 4k edits on this machine and even 1080p edits aren't particularly smooth usable but they're not great Photoshop runs well for some light photo editing alright let's talk about games it's running an HD 5500 which is noticeably slower than the graphics chip on the MacBook Air that runs an HD 6000 and it's also much slower than the asus ux305 am so moderately demanding games like dota 2 here's of the storm we're getting less than 20 frames per second at native res and about 25 to 30 frames per second at 720p with everything on medium so it's playable and you can get better frame rates if you crank everything down but it's not a really enjoyable experience for even moderately demanding games less demanding games like counter-strike perform a little better I mean if you turn everything off get around 45 frames per second at 720p but if gaming performance is important to you I probably pass on this Ultrabook it's not for you battery life is short this thing has a 35 watt hour battery they claim seven and a half hours at well I didn't get anywhere close regular use of just browsing the web and doing some work got me around four and a half hours with screen at sixty percent brightness watching movies off the drive was closer to five hours and battery life while gaming was a little less than two hours okay recap the LG Graham it's a really light ultra buck coming in at 980 grams 1080p non-touchscreen that gets pretty bright doesn't have the best color range keyboard is spacious and feels pretty good to type on but it's not backlit the trackpad is well a standard windows trackpad not amazing inside we have an i5 Broadwell with integrated graphics that's a strong performer for regular Ultrabook use but it struggles with more intensive stuff like gaming and video edits it has eight gigs of RAM which is planning for basically anything you do on this thing 128 gigs of solid-state storage that isn't very fast but it's sufficient for normal use two down firing speakers that sound decent a small battery that gets you four to maybe five hours of battery life and all of this is cooled by a very quiet but very slow fan that unfortunately keeps things pretty damn hot there's a lot of stuff I like about the LG Graham it's thin it's really light and the hardware components they chose are well-suited for like the average ultrabook consumer it's not for everyone some people are going to want faster graphics cards or faster storage but they did a really good job trying to hit like everyone's needs two things bugging though the first thing thermal management I think they did not a great job with it they could have given us a bigger fan or a better fan or just a better heatsink it gets hot like really hot that concerns me the second thing is the build quality I know they use carbon magnesium and lithium magnesium or so they say but the whole device doesn't feel super solid especially that bottom panel now the pricing of it I would consider it appropriately priced I mean you're paying a bit of a premium to hit that really lightweight but for the Ultrabook market I think it's a fair price that's the end of the review hope you guys liked it give me some thumbs if you did subs have you loved it it's been nice I'll see you guys next time you