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The KOREAN laptop you CAN'T buy!

2018-05-15
have you ever looked at something immediately wanted it and then found out that for some reason you can't have it well that was the experience that I had with this the lg ultra PC on the surface it looks kind of like an LG gram which I love but with a little bit more weight and a lot more performance only one small problem it turns out that you can't get this thing outside of Korea the South Korea to be precise I mean look at this look at this amazing promotional video that's gonna make it an engaging or a PC GT only six seconds long for some reason anyway fortunately if you are annoying enough and persistent enough I've often found that you can get what you want eventually and it works for more than just wedding proposals this is the LG Ultra PC a laptop that has never before been seen outside of its homeland and the video about it is brought to you by Mac Weldon Mac Weldon makes high quality clothing be it t-shirts underwear see that right there Mac Weldon underwear my cat scratched me Mac Weldon can do nothing to protect you from cat scratches if it's not you know actually where the underwear is anyway my talking points are not actually on there so they make underwear t-shirts socks wallets and more and you can check them out using offer code tectus to save twenty percent at the link in the video description I mean realistically if there were instructions for how to open the box they weren't gonna be in English so it's open this baby up instructions unclear got bags stuck on head of a baby okay so if you're into that sort of thing LG includes a nice little man satchel it's probably cooler in Korea than it is here yep all right so aside from the actually pretty good feeling and presumably stylish carry bag and the power adapter pretty much the only thing in the box is the ultra PC itself and it looks pretty much exactly like I expected it's a big fat gram overall it's not that heavy for a 15-inch model just about two centimeters thick at its thickest point so again not unreasonably thick and in terms of build quality like it's kind of honestly it's kind of hard to describe it cuz it's like it does feel in some places pretty nice but then that's definitely more keyboard flex than we'd like to see and this is something that has been an ongoing critique of ours about LG is notebooks aisle wise it's reasonable but not exceptional so you got your HDMI headphone microSD USB a couple USB threes a type-c USB 3 not thunderbolt gigabit ethernet fire this thing up shall we is that their slogan in Korea hi there I'm Cortana and I'm here to help a little sign in here a touch a Wi-Fi there and we'll have your PC ready for all you plan to do and if you'd like me to stay quiet you can just mute your PC if you need an assistive screen reader press the why is this in English why does it take so long like what is the point of pre loading all of this stuff so it asks me what region but it asks me in English it's weird this looks like a bog-standard US layout keyboard just with alternate Korean characters on it no I don't want to make her ton of my personal assistant under the hood there's a couple of things about the specs that stood out to us it's got an 85 50 u so that's a quad-core low-power processor eight gigs of ram though it depends what SKU you get as always 240 gig SSD 500 gig hard drive and the big one was that it comes with a geforce gtx 1050 so what we were hoping for was with that low-power processor but a discreet graphics card in a larger clamshell was a nice balance of battery life performance and even the ability to game a little bit hopefully at a decent price let's start let's do that okay so first step is to jump on nine eight and get all our stuff set up and we will be right back even LG's own software on here it's like in English my new I didn't install English Windows Cortana I are I already I told you no I just told you no so these are just ctrl and alt so instead of just labeling both of them twice they just hedged their bets they figured well they'll infer from this control adult that that's also ctrl + alt and vice versa the only Korean only software on here is their support number so we've got all our software loaded up now and one of the first things that we do anytime a notebook hits our lab is slap it with a stress test so stress up to you that and almost immediately we noticed something really interesting about this particular model it detects that it is thermal throttling and in fact it's clock speed does get reduced but the CPU is only sitting at about sixty high to seventy low degrees on each of the individual course so it would appear as though the t-junction temperature was miss configured by the manufacturer now their intent may have been to allow the CPU to burst up during light loads but still not pass a bunch of heat through to the user when it's under a long strenuous load but this does seem like a fairly extreme approach if that was their intent you know overall it really is a testament to how far entry-level / mainstream graphics cards have come that you can play doing on a machine like this with a GTX 1050 and have not a bad experience like I'm running it at high and I'm seeing dips down to the low 30s but like it's very playable especially considering the fairly a/c speakers on the ground the speakers are not bad and I still maintain that at laptop screen sizes 1080p resolution is adequately sufficient though it would be nice if it was a touchscreen now for that let's take it apart so poking around in here there are a couple of takeaways number one is that I'm a little confused as to why LG felt the need to have the CPU thermal throttle which supports our hypothesis that that was sort of an accident because the two heat pipes connected to the CPU actually go to both of these heat exchangers here you can see our GPU over here upgradeable RAM so we've got two sodium slots one of which is empty on our 8gig model but that would be a nice and easy upgrade and actually overall upgrade ability of this device is pretty good you've got an m2 slot here that one is populated and then you've also got room for a two and a half inch hard drive which is also populated but you could swap those out for something else should you desire moving on to the battery we've got a respectable 60 watt hours that did give us about four hours in our standard battery test but I did feel a little disappointed by this just because LG has built such a brand identity for themselves on the grand side of things around having these massive capacity batteries in these thin and light devices and this one just didn't meet my expectations there and there are a handful of other complaints that I have about it as well first of all the keyboard is crap there are two major problems with it one there's a nice tactile bump but the actuation point is pretty much at the bottom of the stroke and to the chassis just isn't stiff enough around my right hand like it's noticeably more flexible compared to my left causing me to regularly miss keystrokes in like this whole half of the keyboard here now to be clear it's not the worst keyboard I've ever used but I would put it below say a dell inspiron the trackpad is good enough no issues but it also didn't Wow me and it's pretty small by today's standards so it gets a fine out of amazing and honestly that's not a bad summary of this device as a whole everything from the performance to the bezels to the webcam is fine except for one big problem the pricing so if you're part of the 0.3% of our audience that is in South Korea it's actually not a terrible option but if like us you were hoping that this would be something like the Xiaomi notebook Pro which wasn't the best laptop we'd ever seen but was priced well enough to be worth the hassle of getting it here from China then you're in for a rude awakening due to South Korea's fairly harsh import regulations and taxes Samsung and LG don't need to be quite as competitive in their home market so this laptop at $1600 would be up against much more premium competitors outside of South Korea another example of this is the Samsung Galaxy s8 a phone that may have actually been made in South Korea but that costs a hundred and thirty dollars more to buy there hooray for Allah God please but it's not a huge loss because even if LG was to bring the Ultra PC to the rest of the world which they've said they have no plans to do the value proposition wouldn't be amazing with a couple more generations of improvement particularly to the stiffness of the chassis and to the keyboard LG may be in a position where with the right pricing they could expand their notebook line internationally though so let's see if they do it speaking of seeing now is the time to see the link in the video description to Dollar Shave Club Dollar Shave Club is more than just razors and they make it easy for you to upgrade your shave and your bathroom you no longer have to step foot in a store to get a high-quality shave and great grooming products delivered right to your door and for a limited time Dollar Shave Club is basically giving away their shower shave starter set to new members for only 5 bucks it features their executive razor and three trial size versions of their most popular products to help you stay fresh and clean so you'll get their shave butter their body wash and their one wipe Charlies butt wipes a focused set of cartridges is included and then after the first box replacement cartridges for the razor are sent for just a few bucks a month the software is exclusively available at dollarshaveclub.com slash Lynas we're gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy this stuff maybe people just have like a comparable laptop it's like cheaper down there at the link in the video description also linked down there's 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