Gadgetory

oh hello there Eva here with her broken axe and this is the 2018 LG Graham ultrabook and this is by far the lightest 15 inch notebook that I've ever held in my hands I mean I'm not kidding this is a pretty lightweight notebook and one of the things that LG has done here is I mean it's nothing it's nothing major I mean they've done a few design shifts which we'll get to shortly but they've updated the internal hardware so this time it's annoyingly newyorkb like our eighth generation use series processor and this particular model that I have over here is specked out it costs $2,000 so definitely it is an expensive or premium notebook or premium price that you're gonna be paying for notebook like this so let's find out how well it performs and what it's like using the LG Graham right after this finally an ultra slim body keyboard with mechanical red or blue switches designed and perfected for work and play that the Sorel Graham XS evolved to fit right in check it out below ok so as always let's start with the build quality and design so LG hasn't made any major changes in this department with the 2018 model the main chassis still features the same premium nano carbon magnesium body and while they've claimed military grade certification on their official website I can't scientifically validate them but here's the thing when you decide to pick up the LG grand notebook the first thing that you would notice is just how lightweight it is and that's thanks to the magnesium alloy construction that they've done here the problem is that it doesn't feel as robust or premium as some of the other ultra books I have taken a look at for example the HP spectre NV 360 and the Dell XPS 13 those notebooks are built like tanks I mean it comes with an aluminum unibody construction it's just it feels a lot more solid in the hand and you can easily toss them in your backpack and you wouldn't have to worry about just long-term durability that's something that I'm it's it's not sometimes questionable with the LG gram because I do remember with last year's model my screen for some reason this was just you know throughout usage the screen for some reason just didn't show up I mean half of it was completely like glitched out and the other half was it kind of worked so I think it has to do with obviously the way how you handle it over time so I'd highly recommend getting a sleeve when you decide to pick up the gram and I'd be extra careful or cautious when handling the grand notebook the screen does exhibit a lot of flex and not even going as far as I can in terms of force with that and it's definitely something to keep in mind I wouldn't you know easily toss me about better be again very cautious that's something that I want to reiterate with the handling part of the gram notebook and a couple things worth mentioning is that the previous LG logo used to be at the top right hand side this time they've eliminated that and replaced it with the gram to emphasise the notebook and it's at the center I like that the webcam has also been shifted from the bottom to the top so you don't have to worry about pointing it at your nose LG did manage to make a little bit of room at the top bezel but realistically you're not going to notice a huge difference while staring at the screen speaking of the screen the Graham features a 15.6 inch 1080p IPS display with minimal bezels of course so just like the previous generation and I think the whole bezel s approach is an expectation and ultrabooks these days because we saw them implement last year with the Graham the XPS and a few of the ultrabooks and we're slowly starting to see them in gaming notebooks so you know the gigabyte aro 15 X as an example MSI just came up with a recent stealth notebook with bezel s design so it is an expectation and once he got restless it's really hard to come back because the good advantage of that is you're not losing a lot in terms of screen resolution you're getting the exact same screen real estate but in a relatively compact form factor and that's awesome the display by itself is pretty good the viewing angles are great and that's expected given the IPS technology the one thing that I did notice is that the contrast ratio is a lot better and balanced compared to last year's model so the whites are not blown out and that's a welcoming change but I did wish of the screen could get a little brighter as it was little difficult to view outdoors needless to say this is a great panel to view content on and you can definitely get away with some light content creation so if you wanna use Photoshop I think you wouldn't have a problem at all do note that this is a touchscreen display and there's a significant amount of wobble while interacting with the screen so I'd recommend staying away from using that plus the screen is glossy so expect a ton of finger prints over time while handling taking a look at the ports on the right you get a Kensington block two USB 3.0 ports a headphone jack and once again we see a micro SD card reader honestly I'm not really sure if I can comment on this implementation because on the previous brand review I did mention that that was a terrible implementation in my opinion I mean a lot of people prefer full-size SD card readers especially if you're a content creator most cameras these days except full-size SD cards so not having that full size SD card slot on an ultrabook is a disappointment I mean they do have the room to implement it's it's just that they decided to go with something that not a lot of people use I mean let me know the comments down below would you have preferred a micro SD card slot or a full-size SD card reader on the granite notebook or just ultra books in general love to hear your thoughts in the comments switching over to the left there's power in an extra USB 3.0 port a full-sized HDMI port and a USB type-c port which thankfully this time supports Thunderbolt 3 so you could take advantage of plugging in an external GPU but I'll leave a link to date to these video in the description down below where he walks you through his experience plugging in an external GPU to the notebook and he should he experienced some performance issues with that so it's something that you should look into you can also use the type C port to charge the notebook but unfortunately LG does not include a USB type-c charger but whether you have to use the dedicated port and this included power adapter which surprisingly is lightweight so you can easily toss this in your backpack it's super compact which is great but it would have been a lot nicer to include a Type C charger I should also mention that the 14 inch version of the gran notebook does not support Thunderbolt 3 but rather it uses C it supports the USB 3.0 protocol so that's something to keep in mind oh and LG gets bonus points for including a USB type-c 2 rj45 LAN port adapter so I'm sure that will come in handy during travel the grand 15 features a sighs keyboard including a numpad which could be useful if you work with a lot of numbers and the key is exited good tactile feedback with pretty good amount of travel distance so typing in general was a pleasant experience I will say however that the keys found on the HP Spectre x-360 are a little bit better in terms of tech Tillet II but that's just a personal thing the power button also acts as a fingerprint reader and it's a nice and subtle implementation quick and easy to unlock the device so that's a nice feature they also made the keyboard backlit with two-step brightness adjustments similar to last year's model the trackpad has also improved a lot compared to last year because LG made the right choice to go with Windows precision drivers over those crappy elon and synaptic drivers so you'll get the best experience with gesture control and the surface is really smooth for finger navigation the primary left and right buttons are integrated at the bottom they are a little bit on the mushy side I'm not so quickly a fan of integrated buttons I prefer them dedicated but that's just again personal preference the speakers are located at the bottom so they aren't downwards firing if you're listening to a lot of music that's heavily emphasis on vocals you're not going to be getting the best experience because as soon as you plays it on your desk the vocals just completely just gets muffled down you're going to be listening to a lot of bass I think the bass will sort of overpower that I wish they implemented some sort of front-facing speakers so that it's more directional so you can actually get a good experience out of it but needless to say they're pretty good it's just not as good as something like the HP Spectre x-360 because the speakers on those were incredible alright so let's get into the internals of this notebook so as I mentioned the beginning of this video this particular laptop is loaded with specs I mean it's a $2,000 notebook so it comes with a core i7 85 fifty-year quad core processor it comes to the base clock of 1.8 gigahertz with a boost up to 4 gigahertz it comes with 16 gigabytes of RAM clocked at 2400 megahertz in terms of storage this now becomes a to 512 gigabytes SATA based end up to SSDs for a total of 1 terabytes and that's an interesting choice because most ultra books specifically the competition they offer nvme solutions so if you're looking for the fastest read and write performance that's something that you should look into because this as you can see the read and writes needs average between 450 to 550 megabytes per second which is in terrible by the way because from my day-to-day users just browsing the web opening up applications it was speedy and I didn't have any problems on that department but if you are looking for the fastest reading read performance this notebook isn't up for you another thing worth mentioning is that accessing the internals of the notebook was quite challenging and required the removal of the adhesive rubber feet which was of no good use after so keep note of that the good news is that once you get in both the SSDs and the RAM modules can be user replaced but it isn't recommended by LG so with all that out of the way how does this notebook perform well just as expected it's right on par with the rest of the ultra books featuring the agent item CPUs Cinebench r15 running the CPU test yielded a little shy of 550 points switching to OpenGL we get around 51 frames per second thanks to the decent integrated view HD graphics real world tests like handbrake luxe mark and GIMP perform just as good as the XPS 13 that I tested a while back featuring an 8th gen course and CPU remember guys these quad-core hyper-threaded processors are nothing short of amazing they're an excellent upgrade for multitasking scenarios now I wouldn't recommend intense video editing on the lg gram since the lack of a dedicated GPU severely affects many times casual 1080p edits are ok but I decided to stretch the CPUs performance anyways by rendering a one-minute 4k video and as you can see the system took a little over 12 minutes to complete the task definitely way over that one-to-one ratio what about gaming well remember this is an ultrabook after all so I would keep your expectations low because the integrated UHT graphics is not that great overwatch set to 1080p at low dished out roughly 60 frames per second which is pretty comfortable but if you throw in demanding titles like battlefield 1 or 49 you're not gonna expect those exact same frame rates at that resolution the thermal performance on the grand notebook was a little disappointing so during my Ida 64 stress a few tests and noticed that the CPU temperatures were hitting as far as anyone seen but the experience throttling so clock speeds we're hitting as far as 2 gigahertz which shouldn't be the case because they turbo spec on this particular CPU should reach as far as 2 gigahertz on all 4 cores but that was not the case but remember this is a very full 100% work load so if your application takes advantage of course if the utilization is around 85 to 90% you can definitely expect clock speeds a little bit higher and of course during idle tasks like browsing the web or watching videos you can definitely hit see those clock speeds head as far as 4 gigahertz so definitely keep this in mind it is unfortunate that LG decided to go with a single fan solution to cool both the CPU and the integrated GPU I would have preferred a dual fan setup just like some other notebooks but it is what we get battery life on the LG Chem notebook was excellent in fact I did manage to put this up against the HP Spectre x-360 and the XPS 13 featuring agency B use one thing to note is that both those laptops which are 61 our batteries compared to sending to water hours on the grand new book so expect around 11 hours under light load use and our tests involved refreshing a web page in Chrome for 15 seconds until it completely depleted the battery under heavy load which involves real bench running on a loop this notebook lasted for around three hours so it's right on par with the XPS and the HP notebooks which is pretty good so definitely expect good battery life out of the LG cram notebook you wouldn't have any problem taking it or just using this notebook throughout the day and so this brings us to the conclusion the grand 15 by LG is by far the lightest 15-inch ultra bug that I've ever held in my head and this is an interesting laptop because for one we're typically used to seeing 13 to 14 inch ultrabooks sort of you know mop and go around the market but a 15-inch ultrabook is definitely interesting and if you're someone who is looking into getting an ultrabook with a slightly larger screen I think the 15 inch is a pretty good option but there are a few things to keep in mind one the build quality you have to be really cautious while handling this because as you can see the screen it flexes and I can't really guarantee you the best longevity out of this because I personally have to test it myself and the other thing is thermal performance if you're planning on running heavier tasks like for example if your application particularly uses all four cores at 100% load or you're definitely going to notice CPU throttling and that's unfortunate and the other thing is if you decide to plug in an external GPU and like Dee mention in this video you're not going to be getting the best performance out of it and obviously that's due to the thermal limitation on the positive side they've improved the trackpad the keyboard is nice and tactile I wish that the display was a little brighter but it's still great it's an IPS panel viewing angles are great but you know for $2,000 I was expecting a little bit more that's just my personal opinion because I wouldn't spend $2,000 on a notebook like this especially when you decide to load it up with specs you can definitely pick up the 14-inch Berrien for a lot cheaper but you are sacrificing a little bit on that because you would obviously lose the thunderbolt support the number-3 support with the USB type-c and a few more so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the LG um notebook specifically this 15 inch model would you be willing to spend $2,000 on an ultrabook or are you much better off picking a gaming laptop at that price point let me know in the comments down below i'm eber with high breaking outs thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one you