LG P330 review by Natadiem

Id love to see more benchmarks from different people if thats cool

 

No, I'm pretty sure that the problem is in the inf files because my computer lost gt555m gpu from the device manager when using anything else than the LG's own drivers.

 

Tried using the inf from LG driver and replace the inf on newer nVidia driver?
LG?? ??? ?? - ???? ?? - ???? / SW

 

Here's the one I use if you wanna give it a shot. I use the 285.62 version:

Drivers | laptopvideo2go.com

It should let you download a modified inf at the bottom.

 

If you have the appropriate power cable from another charger or power brick, you can actually just swap the cables and plug the Canada/US cable into the charger and you won't even need an adapter.

 

just want to ask...is it an ELAN or synaptics touchpad in the P330?

 

Synaptics (10 chars)

 

Strongly considering this little guy and had a few questions if anyone who owns one knows...

The primary hdd is 7mm correct? Is this a sata 2 or 3 ? Has anyone tried the samsung 830 series?

There is an msata slot, has anyone replaced it yet?

Is the battery swap able? How much is an extra one? won is okay.

 

The HDD in my UE70K is actually a Toshiba MK7559GSXP, which is 9.5mm. There is an mSATA slot, but I don't think anyone has upgraded the SSD yet. The battery is swappable, but I don't know the cost of an extra pack.

Now here's a question to the other P330 owners: what do you guys think of the wireless performance?

 

I don't mind the wireless performance, but my internet is not the best there is.

Has anyone been using the usb 3.0 slot? Do I have to activate it first? I am using a usb 3.0 enabled external hd and I am finding the transfer speeds to be average at best. More like a 2.0

 

What type of security do you use on your router? I have a Netgear WNDR3700 router set to WPA-PSK [TKIP] + WPA2-PSK [AES]. I used to have it set to just WPA2-PSK [AES], but then my P330 would disconnect a lot (windows would report that internet is unavailable). In other words, I'm forced to use WPA-PSK which also means that I'm not getting 802.11n speeds. Another thing that bothers me is that my laptop seems to slow down my wireless network by quite a lot, even when I connect using WPA2. On top of that the wireless network card in the P330 doesn't support 5GHz. On a positive note: I'm quite pleased with the signal strength I'm getting.

Of course, things could be worse. I've had two Asus laptops not getting an internet connection at all on my network. I love my router too much to change brand though. Think I'll upgrade to the WNDR4700 when that one comes out, but I'm also strongly considering replacing the network card in my P330 as well. I did some tests with wireless security turned off, and it became clear to me that it wasn't all that fast.

 

I'm looking into buying a Killer Wireless-N card for my P330. Seems I'm limited to the 1102 unless I add a third antenna. Any recommendations for the placement of a third one? Any specific brands to prefer? I'm currently looking at antennas from Tyco. Is there anything I should be aware of before going through with this? Thanks!

 

Great review, this notebook should be a winner.

 

I use WPA2-PSK [AES] only. I don't know much about routers either. The internet and the router were already set up when I moved in.

 

Have you guys noticed that the laptop does an auto brightness thing when it is on battery? Anyone knows of a way stop it.

 

Huh? It does? I've barely used it on battery, so no, I haven't noticed it...

Sent from my Optimus 2X using Tapatalk

 

That's in your power options. Just right click the battery icon in your system tray and choose power options. Then choose change plan settings next to the profile that's checked, and you should be able to adjust brightness with the slider when on battery and plugged in.

 

Can you please explain what you mean by auto brightness? Is it as simple as HTWingNut suggested, that you're talking about the screen being less bright when on battery? Or are you talking about the brightness being lowered when you've been inactive for X mins? Or do you mean, as I initially thought, that the brightness is being adjusted as if there was an Ambient Light Sensor controlling it?

 

I know AMD has something called "Varibright" that automagically adjusts the brightness to save power, but it was more annoying than anything, made it seem like my LCD was going bad or something. Not sure if nVidia/Intel has something similar.

 

The Intel one is called "Display power saving technology", its under Intel HD Control Panel, Power - Power source (on battery), then untick it.

 

I see. The reason I hadn't noticed was that I had unticked pretty much every program from the boot list in msconfig.

 

Do you guys have any news about replacing the HDD with the SSD?

 

I will put on my UE40K Samsung M8 HDD, what replace that 640GB HDD and then mSata Intel 310 80Gb SSD. I hope they all works fine

 

This is probably a stupid question but here goes: How do you make the speakers and headphones show up as seperate devices in the windows sound manager? Right now both show up as "Speakers", which means that settings are shared between the two (SRS on/off, Volume). I noticed that there's an option in the Realtek HD Audio Manager to seperate input devices, but I can't find something similar for output devices.

 

Finally received my P330 eu40k model after about 2 weeks in customs:/ Great impressions so far: nice design, solid screen hinge, lightweight, compact, fast and very very silent/cool even under stress realy impressed by that. Trackpad is okay keyboard is great. Realy hope batterylife as good as stated. Right now im removing all pre-installed junk. Does anyone know if Nvidia Optimus or the Intel Turboboost still needs some of that software to work? Will make review and run benchmarks later.

 

Diesel,

I have one of these shipping today. Did you get any sort of driver disk? I usually like to do a wipe and a clean Windows 7 install (I have Windows Ultimate keys through my MSDN account). I havent been able to find a place to download the drivers on the LG site. Also what country are you in? Im in the US and Im wondering if I have a two week wait for customs too look forward to also!

Thanks!
mrfurby2u

 

Nah wont take as long as me i guess. Belgian customs tax every package so always takes way too long. Had to send transaction details etc + pay 20% taxes realy sucks:/ All together i did pay a rather hefty price for this laptop about 1600usd (not the ue70k model) but i knew was going to pay alot for the most powerful 13" available.

No driver disk in the box (only korean manual and quick start, battery and adapter) but there is a safe partition (15GB) on the disk that contains them i think.

Thought of installing clean W7 too but think its easier and faster to just uninstall all crapware. Currently im at 47 running background processes, coming from 75

 

Can someone confirm that the serial bottom of p330, will pass other windows 7 home premium media software? And have you guys done recovery from original windows 7?
mrfurby2u: here is the link to those drivers --> LG?? ??? ??? ?? > ????????

 

Thanks Makro! Just what I needed!

 

Here's part 1 of my review.

I was looking for a thin ultraportable with good graphics performance and decent battery life a combination hard to find. Most of the Sandybridge-ultrabooks being released right now only have the inbuilt HD3000 gpu which really is not capable of decent HD playback/gaming.
This will likely change with Ivy Bridge-notebooks and the integrated HD4000 which, according to rumors, will have double the performance of current Sandybridge graphics.

Competition

Main competitors of the P330 in the [13-14”, sub-1000 EUR, with dedicated GPU]-market are:

- Acer TimelineX 3830tg
pros: great cobalt blue design, super battery life (up to 8 hours wifi browsing), good performance GT540m gpu
cons: bad throttling issues when under load (cpu scales back to 1.2 Ghz), size (2,25cm depth) and weight (1,9kg) are a bit on the heavy side

- Asus U36sd-A1
pros: very thin (only 1,85cm depth) and low weight (1,66kg), great battery life
cons: high temperatures when under load, GT520m = entry level gpu; not much better than the integrated HD3000.

- Msi X460DX
pros: great performance from the GT540m gpu, fast 7200rpm hard drive, dvd-drive
cons: size (2,5cm depth) and weight (2kg) are a bit on the heavy side

- Sony Vaio SB
pros: superior vaio design, illuminated keyboard, low weight (1,75kg)
cons: size (2,3cm depth), very loud fan noise even when idle, AMD 6470M = entry level gpu; same as GT520m, manual gpu switching

- Asus U44sg
pros: thin bezel, low weight (1,7kg), very thin (1,9cm depth), great battery life, 14-incher in a 13 inch design
cons: geforce 610M = entry level gpu; slightly better than GT520m, availability?

As you can see in the list above, ultraportables with a good GPU eather have to sacrifice thin design and low weight or have temperature/noise issues. How does P330 hold up?


Design (9/10)

Sleek darkblue aluminium exterior gives a premium business look. Personally I don’t like the rounded Mac-like corners so the P330 is great with its sharp edges. I do like the Vaio SB design just a little bit better.


Weight (10/10)

Weight is really low at only 1.7kg. It’s comparable to the weight of Asus U36sd and the Sony Vaio SB, slightly heavier than most of the ultrabooks. They can’t cut down on weight much more in this form factor considering the performance you get.


Size (8/10)

It would have been great if they managed to keep the depth of the notebook below 2cm aka “ultrabook size”. The laptop isn’t huge but it’s definitely not the thinnest 13” either. It’s good thing the front is thinner than the backside, which gives an overall slimmer impression.
Lowering the depth most likely would have resulted in cooling problems, so I’m fine with that.


Connectivity (9/10)

Basic ports are available including 2 USB 2.0, 1 USB 3.0, Bluetooth 3.0, HDMI port, VGA, Ethernet, multi card reader and Kensington lock. The new Intel WIDI technology is missing which you do get on the MSI X460DX and the Sony Vaio SB. Placement of the ports is good 2 usb ports on the right, 1 on the left. Wifi speed was painfully slow at first boot , until I removed some sort of network security software that came pre-installed. Now network speeds are acceptable but still could have been better. Speedtest.net gave me 25ms ping time, 1Mbps download speed and 0,3 Mbps upload. I guess the Ralink wireless network card isn’t the best so might eventually swap it for something better.


Keyboard (9/10)

Keys provide good feedback. Keyboard is not too small, not too big. Too bad there is no caps-lock / num-lock indicator light, but you do get an onscreen notification when you change state of these buttons. There is also a button to toggle fan speed between normal and silent but I can’t really tell the difference.. An illuminated keyboard like the one on the Vaio SB would have made it perfect.


Trackpad (8/10)

Nothing special here just your standard Synaptics touchpad. As mentioned a bit on the small side but the texture does give a good feedback. Can’t seem to find the scrolling feature tho.. Anyone?

Display (8/10)

The thin bezel design is nice although it doesn’t reach all the way to the edge of the screen. Screen hinge is solid build, no shaking when you move the laptop. Colors, brightness and viewing angles are well enough for my needs. Images do seem a little pixelated if you look closely. I’m coming from a 1680x1050 resolution so it is adjusting a bit to the lower resolution. The slim profile of the display is nice.

Applications performance (10/10)

It doesn’t get any better than this within this form factor. The dual core i5-2435m processor is way fast enough for any application or game I use. Decompressing an archive of 8GB that took few minutes on my previous laptop is done here in less than a minute, while browsing and installing a program in the background with no lag whatsoever. Office applications, SPSS, SQL, Photoshop etc. all run very smoothly.

When stressed, the bottleneck is the 5400rpm hard drive, so I might swap it for an SSD in the future. Does anyone know whether the UE40k model has the 4GB SSD or not and whether the Expresscache program pre-installed is useful?

Will add PCMark Vantage results later.

Coming up next: gaming performance, battery, emissions and conclusion.

 

Most of the specs online list a 40gb MSATA SSD that is used as cache by the Intel Rapid Storage driver for the UE40K.

 

Great that you guys enjoy it.

Definitely let us know more!

 

Where did you buy yours?

 

I did a test with WPA2 or no security (don't remember but I was at least getting 'n' speeds) and got 13Mbps down and 26Mbps up with 5 ms. Problem is that it's still not fast enough to stream all the movies on my home network. As you'd imagine I'm not getting such speeds when sitting further away from my router and last but most importantly I keep losing my connection when using WPA2 (forced to use WPA with 'g' speeds, but it's still not that slow). I would be comfortable with replacing my network card (thinking about the Killer Wireless-N 1103), but I would need advice on where to place the third antenna to achieve the best possible performance.

 

Last weekend I noticed a new seller that had the UE40K for $1550USD on ebay and I couldn't resist. So far the seller has been awesome in communication and it shipped yesterday. Korea was shut down Mon and Tues for New Year celebrations (must be some party!).

Edit: BTW when I say new seller I meant not the normal seller that has the P330's, not new as in a first timer.

 

I seriously think I could have made lots of money if I decided to just open a shipping kiosk for the P330s with extras....

But yeah, the UE40Ks cost around $1200 USD in Korea, must be lower for the retailers at Yongsan, so they should be making a lot of money just by shipping it out.

 

I sold a couple of P330's from Korea to members on here, but the prices that I got the P330's were higher than the Yongsan prices. Also if paid directly with Paypal rather than on Ebay, I can deduct an additional $60 because thats what Ebay usually takes for Final value fees, Grrrr!!

 

Edited.

--

 

I bought the P330's directly from the LG store
and the prices are higher than Yongsan. When I went to a couple of vendors in Yongsan they said they were out of stock
Im a honest person and seller. If someone wants to trust a vendor in Yongsan then go for it. But I know Yongsan well and most of the sellers are pretty sneaky when dealing with foreigners.

 

All right, if you say so.

I'll edit my post.

 

No worries. I should have mentioned in my post

 

Here's last part of my review.


I was looking for a thin ultraportable with good graphics performance and decent battery life, a combination hard to find. Most of the Sandybridge-ultrabooks being released right now only have the inbuilt HD3000 gpu which really is not capable of decent HD playback/gaming.
This will likely change with Ivy Bridge-notebooks and the integrated HD4000 which, according to rumors, will have double the performance of current Sandybridge graphics.

Competition

Main competitors of the P330 in the [13-14”, sub-1000 EUR, with dedicated GPU]-market are:

- Acer TimelineX 3830tg
pros: great cobalt blue design, super battery life (up to 8 hours wifi browsing), good performance GT540m gpu
cons: bad throttling issues when under load (cpu scales back to 1.2 Ghz), size (2,25cm depth) and weight (1,9kg) are a bit on the heavy side

- Asus U36sd-A1
pros: very thin (only 1,85cm depth) and low weight (1,66kg), great battery life
cons: high temperatures when under load, GT520m = entry level gpu; not much better than the integrated HD3000.

- Msi X460DX
pros: great performance from the GT540m gpu, fast 7200rpm hard drive, dvd-drive
cons: size (2,5cm depth) and weight (2kg) are a bit on the heavy side

- Sony Vaio SB
pros: superior vaio design, illuminated keyboard, low weight (1,75kg)
cons: size (2,3cm depth), very loud fan noise even when idle, AMD 6470M = entry level gpu; same as GT520m, manual gpu switching

- Asus U44sg
pros: thin bezel, low weight (1,7kg), very thin (1,9cm depth), great battery life, 14-incher in a 13 inch design
cons: geforce 610M = entry level gpu; slightly better than GT520m, availability?

As you can see in the list above, ultraportables with a good GPU either have to sacrifice thin design and low weight or have temperature/noise issues. How does P330 hold up?


Design (9/10)

Sleek dark blue aluminium exterior gives a premium business look. Personally I don’t like the rounded Mac-like corners so the P330 is great with its sharp edges. I do like the Vaio SB design just a little bit better.


Weight (10/10)

Weight is really low at only 1.7kg. It’s comparable to the weight of Asus U36sd and the Sony Vaio SB, slightly heavier than most of the ultrabooks. They can’t cut down on weight much more in this form factor considering the performance you get.


Size (8/10)

It would have been great if they managed to keep the depth of the notebook below 2cm aka “ultrabook size”. The laptop isn’t huge but it’s definitely not the thinnest 13” either. It’s good thing the front is thinner than the backside, which gives an overall slimmer impression.
Lowering the depth most likely would have resulted in cooling problems, so I’m fine with that.


Connectivity (9/10)

Basic ports are available including 2 USB 2.0, 1 USB 3.0, Bluetooth 3.0, HDMI port, VGA, Ethernet, multi card reader and Kensington lock. The new Intel WIDI technology is missing which you do get on the MSI X460DX and the Sony Vaio SB. Placement of the ports is good 2 usb ports on the right, 1 on the left. Wi-Fi speed was painfully slow at first boot , until I removed some sort of network security software that came pre-installed. Now network speeds are acceptable but still could have been better. Speedtest.net gave me 25ms ping time, 1Mbps download speed and 0,3 Mbps upload. (this was due to my own network, testing on another network I got 2.5 Mbps download and 1.81 upload so not too bad). Network speeds are now good.


Keyboard (9/10)

Keys provide good feedback. Keyboard is not too small, not too big. Too bad there is no caps-lock / num-lock indicator light, but you do get an onscreen notification when you change state of these buttons. There is also a button to toggle fan speed between normal and silent but I can’t really tell the difference.. An illuminated keyboard like the one on the Vaio SB would have made it perfect.


Trackpad (8/10)

Nothing special here just your standard touchpad. As mentioned a bit on the small side but the texture does give a good feedback. Now the laptop comes preinstalled with synaptics driver but it is actually an elantech touchpad so you sure want to install the latest elantech drivers that make you able to use features like 2 finger scrolling, pinch to zoom, rotate gesture and more of that fancy stuff.


Display (8/10)

The thin bezel design is nice although it doesn’t reach all the way to the edge of the screen. Screen hinge is solid build, no shaking when you move the laptop. Colors, brightness and viewing angles are well enough for my needs. Images do seem a little pixelated if you look closely. I’m coming from a 1680x1050 resolution so it is adjusting a bit to the lower resolution. The slim profile of the display is nice.


Applications performance (10/10)

It doesn’t get any better than this within this form factor. The dual core i5-2435m processor is way fast enough for any application or game I use. Decompressing an archive of 8GB that took few minutes on my previous laptop is done here in less than a minute, while browsing and installing a program in the background with no lag whatsoever. Office applications, SPSS, SQL, Photoshop etc. all run very smoothly.

When stressed, the bottleneck is the 640gb 5400rpm hard drive, so I might swap it for an SSD in the future. The laptop already has a secondary 4gb SSD drive that is used for fast booting and caching. This makes it possible for the system to cold boot within 30 seconds on Win7, pretty neat.

Calculating PI to 1 million decimals takes 13sec with SuperPi.

Will add PCMark Vantage results later.


Gaming performance (10/10)

The P330 can play almost any recent game at high detail, native resolution. I think the GT555m will be capable of running new games for a good time to come. Even when Ivy bridge arrives it’s very likely the GT555m is still a lot faster. Every game <2010 is playable max detail.

One thing I did notice is when you’re on battery there is some GPU throttling. This means the integrated gpu will sometimes take over from the dedicated GT555m resulting in framedrops obviously. Most like this is due to the GT555m not getting enough power. Haven’t experienced this when plugged in so nothing to worry about.

Below the average framerates for some more recent games I tested. Only visuals of Skyrim, Metro and Battlefield 3 have to be turned down a little.

Skyrim: high/med, 35 fps
Battlefield 3: high/med, 30 fps
Unreal Tournament 3 demo: 60 fps (max)
Deus Ex HR: high, 47 fps
Dirt 3: high, 48 fps
COD Black Ops: ultra, 38 fps
Crysis 2: advanced: 35 fps
GTA 4: to be tested
Metro 2033: med, 35 fps
Just Cause 2: high 55fps
Stalker COP: max, 35fps

3DMark gave the system a 10307 score on default settings.


Battery (8/10)

Haven’t been experimenting with battery for too long but here are 3 scenario’s I tested.

Using only office applications, wifi off, 50% brightness = 6 hours of usage.
Moderate browsing, wifi on, 70% brightness = 5 hours of usage.
Don’t expect to game for a long time on battery because with heavy usage, wifi on, 100% brightness and using GT555m, the battery is dead in less than an hour.

Battery life, while not as impressive as the Asus U36sd, is good.


Temperature (9/10)

When browsing and doing normal tasks or watching a movie, the notebook doesn’t get hot at all even when using it on your lap. Haven’t tried gaming while on my lap but that’s just stupid so doesn’t matter if it gets hot. Even with the most demanding games temperature remains very comfortable.


Noise (9/10)

This thing is silent. Seriously. While browsing, using office apps, watching movie you have to hold your breath to hear the fan. Only when gaming the fan kicks in but not anything like the jet engines I had before, it’s still very quiet. Very impressed by this considering the cooling for the power under the hood that has to be done. As mentioned there is also a fan switch button but normal and silent mode both are equally silent.


Conclusion (9/10)

I’m not rating sound quality because this is irrelevant to me when I buy a laptop, but I can tell you that the sound for sure is below average and the worst aspect of this notebook if it would matter. Even a 10” netbook I bought few years ago produces better sound. There is an option to enable SRS technology which I strongly advise you to do if you would want to play any music at all through the speakers. It makes the experience a little more painful.

That aside, the non availability pretty much everywhere in the world at the moment is an issue. I had to import the laptop which made the overall cost (VAT, taxes,..) rather high about 1600usd, comparable to price of a 13” Macbook Air/Pro (heavier, no dGPU, mac). Can be different in your case depending where you live or as availability becomes better. This is something I did knew before I bought the unit and I think is definitely worth it. Will be using this one for some time to come.

Thanks Ryan for getting en shipping the laptop!

Bottom line: This really is the best 13” laptop available on the market today. Minor details like an average display don’t weigh up to all other elements, which are all extremely good. If you are looking for a 13” laptop and you have the chance to buy one of these go for it!


Summary

Pro: Design, superb performance, low weight, good battery life, low heat / noise.
Cons: Average display, just a fraction too thick, (availability/price).

Score: 9/10

 

You can download and use the latest driver from Nvidia ( 290.53) as long as you couple it with a modified .INF file. If you don't want to mod it yourself you can download one here:

Yup, the UE40K has 4GB Express Cache.

 

Hey, how do I install the driver with the inf file? I got them both, but am a little confused where to go now.

 

Its been a while since I've done it but as I recall the driver you download is a compressed executable that you can extract. Once you extract it you replace the INF file with the modded one and then run setup.

 

Need bigger SSD on this. Is there anyone tried 240gb ssd bigger ones??

 

I just put in a 128GB mSata SSD in my Y570 and installed a fresh copy of the OS on it. Then I use the stock HDD for storage. Im planning on doing the same with the P330.

 

I have also mSata 80Gb SSD for OS and 1Tb HDD but when Im gaming on HDD, the max temp were if I remember right was 50celsius and that is so warm. I think it raise temperature of processor and gpu also... This is why I need bigger SSD for storage/gaming coze those are cooler. Is the SanForce controller SSD:s the problem with this laptop/HM65 chipset?

 

HDD at 50'c is not good for the HDD.

Maybe the thin profile prevents adequate ventilation for the HDD spot.

The SSDs generally run cool, I would assume you have a 7200 RPM HDD in there, right?

 

Yes, maybe the thin profile and no, its 5400rpm hdd. What do you think, will SandForce works on this p330 hm65??