New LG Gram 17

Dual fan might work better as you can use the stock fan for PWM and hopefully the fan power delivery can drive two of them at once, they should both just change speed at the same time, just need a fan with the same voltage. Might work!

 

Yes I agree and if I started with a stock machine again, I probably would do that as it's the easiest solution, but I think my built-in fan control is gone now. It doesn't output the right signal for the built-in fan anymore. I think it was a bad idea to connect the rpm signal coming from another fan to it. So I need a custom solution anyway and being able to use the cpu temp to ramp up the fan is tempting. The original system always uses a cpu-proximity temp value and that's why the fan only kicks in once temp throttling is very close.
Power is definitely sufficient for multiple fans. Btw. does anyone know the name/spec/digikey-part-nr of that fan connector? It's used in many laptops but with different pinouts and I'd like to buy sockets and plugs but I can't determine the type.

 

I recently bought a LG Gram 17 and I'm having issues with charging through the USB-C port. I'm hoping someone on this forum can help. Whenever I plug my USB-C wall charger that supplies 10W (5V, 2A) into my LG Gram, I get an error message that I need to use a charger that supplies at least 10W. I've used the same charger to charge my 15 inch Samsung Notebook 9 Pro, so I know it works. I've also tried several other chargers that supply 10W (5V, 2A), and my Anker battery pack that supplies 5V, 2.4A, and I keep getting the same error message.

This is actually my second LG Gram 17: Amazon sent me a replacement LG Gram because the first one was having the same issue (I thought it was defective). I've read in reviews that the LG Gram 17 can be charged with a typical USB-C cell phone charger that provides 10W (5V, 2A). I doubt I've received 2 LG Grams that have the same charging defect. Please tell me what's going on. I would really like to be able to charge my LG Gram with just my cell phone charger or battery pack. Thanks.

 

You might need to call LG about that. I've personally never tried charging with anything smaller than a MacBook Pro 15 charger (87W) on the USB port.

 

I just tried using an AUKey multiport charger and this also doesn't charge for me. I then also tried using a Nintendo Switch charger and that one works. So maybe it just wants more than 10W? Or maybe some of the phone charger just use the USB-C port and don't really implement the protocols?

I'm thinking about getting that extremely small innergie PowerGear 60W usb-c charger http://www.myinnergie.com/sg/product/136. Has anyone tries this with the Gram 17? It's rather pricey, but oh-so small.

 

Hi,

I bought a 15-17 inch sleeve from amazon which fits nicely.



Fixing the touchpad problem on Ubuntu 19.04 was too complicated for me, was able to track something,
but do not have knowledge of all the other things ...

Also I have contacted Matan, how has wrote the linux drivers for Lg Gram 17.
-----------------------------------------
On Sat, 18 May 2019, XXX wrote:

> Hello Matan,
>
> thank you very mutch for your work with Drivers for Lg Gram.
> I have a LG Gram 17 and Ubuntu 19.04 installed, includingt the new Drivers.
>
> Regarding your Documentation,
> https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/laptops/lg-laptop.rst
>
> But these keys dont work
> * FN-F1 (LG control panel) - Generates F15
> * FN-F5 (Touchpad toggle) - Generates F13
> * FN-F6 (Airplane mode) - Generates RFKILL
> * FN-F8 (Keyboard backlight) - Generates F16. This key also changes keyboard backlight mode.
> * FN-F9 (Reader mode) - Generates F14

Don't work as in do not generate keys, or do they generate keyboard
events but those do not have the desired effect?

I attached a file with the newest version of my code.
make should compile it, if you have the necessary prerequisite for
compiling modules installed.
make install (as root) should install it, but you can simply use rmmod
to remove the one that you have and insmod to insert the new one.

I attached a file with a systematic listing of all test of driver
features (1-18) and all information (a-d) I need to try to improve the
driver.

I will be thankful for as much answers as you have patience for.
--
Matan.
-----------------------------------------

So nice, he send the source code and a nice manual for every step (!), but I am really a linux noob.
If I struggle here somehow ... maybe I cant use my laptop for work .... If anybody is interested
I would like to forward his email.

Best Regards
Simon

 

Wow this looks nice, nearly the same size as my 18W pixel charger. I still leave the included pin/barrel plug charger in all the time just to leave the USB-C port unused.

I wouldn't mind helping out if no one else can.

 

I did my final build using dual fans.

I used two slim (5mm height) fans I bought from Conrad https://www.conrad.com/p/sepa-hy60q...-vdc-41-mh-l-x-w-x-h-609-x-5-x-564-mm-1664478
They are not very powerful, but quiet and don't use a lot of power. And they fit perfectly (and turn the right way unlike other fans I tried).



I built a new heatpipe/fin assembly using the chipquik solder and a 200mm/11.2mm/3mm heatpipe. In order to cover all cores with the heatpipe I hat to bend it twice and the bends didn't come out as nicely as the last time, but the impact isn't that bad. Or let's say the heatpipe still isn't the limiting factor.
I now use an ATTiny85v chip to drive the fans at 25kHz based on temperature values read on the underside of the heatpipe. This chip uses a lot less electricity than the trinket I was using before. The fans are slightly tilted to enable air to enter from the underside. I think what makes this a winner over the dell fan setup I had before is the slimness of the fans. As they are just 5mm in height, air can easily enter. The fan I was using before probably couldn't breathe right. To use these dual fans I had to remove more material from the chassis and modify it to have a wider exhaust. I used an torch-heated exacto knife to cut the extra holes into the plastic.




Using all of this I can finally run at 32W forever and the max temp I'm seeing is 85 C.

I then overdid everything and started running prime95 which turned out to consume up to 46W of power. That's when I hit a cpu power supply brown-out (= total system shutdown). Luckily there was no damage, but I don't feel comfortable going over 30W now. I did set up some power limiting in throttlestop to limit around 30W and prevent shutdowns.

Looking for this setup I tried many heatsink/pipe/fin combinations and often had issues with big differences in core temps. As not much pressure can be used to mount things to the cpu, it is extremely important to get a totally flat surface and use a small amount of tim. I built the sink from copper and thin copper turned out to be too flexible, so this final version uses 0.8 mm of copper on top of the CPU.
With the last version I think I finally nailed it and now all cores stay within 3 C. When experimenting I had deltas of up to 15 C and of course thermal throttling kicks in when the first core reaches 90 C.

I "cleaned up" the build by using a lot of tape.




During all of this modding I found something else that annoys me about my Gram17. On my machine, the trackpad would move ever so slightly when dragging fingers from the bottom to the top, giving a weird almost clicking touch sensation. The top of the trackpad was about 0.1mm loose and would sometimes move up and down. I was able to fix it by adding stripes of paper below the trackpad frame mounting screws. To do that the battery had to be removed which is surprisingly easy - just a few screws. Pictured is the underside of the trackpad normally covered by the battery.

 

That's fantastic! LG should definitely do this same thing in the next Gram 17. Those fans are a fantastic find, the two together consume the same amount of power as the single stock fan , but you have twice the surface area from that heat sink if not more. Great job! I'd be happy to just maintain 25W with a higher boost clock.

 

I fixed a few problems in the keyboard backlight helper tray app I made. It now uses the latest winring0 lib I could find (from March '19) and does a lot less polling of the backlight EC register.

 

Question for LG Gram 17 owner:
How do you like the keyboard?

Individual keys seem to be shrunk a little bit to make room for the numpad.

Is the key travel much better than MacBook butterfly keyboard?

The touchpad is off center with respect to the placement of your hands. Does that bother you?

 

I like the keyboard.

Most keys have their normal size, but the numpad is shrunk quite a bit and has a weird layout. I don't like the numpad, but to be honest I haven't used it much. It's weird not to have a real numpad as there is so much space left and I'd rather have none than this one with the operators at weird locations.

The key travel is MUCH better than on these butterfly keyboards. I really dislike them and actually sold a MacBook because I could not stand working on the keyboard.

I like the gram keyboard more than many other windows laptop keyboards I have access to. To me, it's better than an msi laptop keyboard (steelseries), better than a lenovo yoga keyboard and better than those hp consumer laptop keyboards. Laptop keyboards I like more than the gram one are various thinkpad keyboards and the huawei matebook x pro keyboard.

The trackpad offset IMHO looks a bit ugly, but I don't find it annoying. I just position myself a bit to the left . When I ordered the machine I was worried about it, but now I'm totally used to it. I did move the windows taskbar to the right side of the screen, so my typing area would be better centered.

 

I really like the keyboard. As someone that uses both one of the MBP 15 butterfly keyboards (2017) it's SO MUCH BETTER than that keyboard. I'm pretty much used to it being offset, maybe it was easier for me since I had an MSI 16L13 (GT62 chassis type) before this and it was the same pretty much. I think some of my problems still come from switching back and forth between the 2017 MBP 15 keyboard and the Gram 17 keyboard on a pretty consistent basis so I don't get that 100% immersion.

I'm trying to move more and more of my workflow to the Gram 17. I would say you can pretty much get used to any keyboard over time as you build muscle memory with it. I think that's true of the Gram 17 as I've noticed my typing does improve on it the more I use it consistently. I have a problem saying that about the MBP Butterfly keyboards because I really just don't like the feel of them and believe me I've tried so hard to get used to it. I still make a ton of mistakes with it. The Gram 17 has better travel and typing feel. It IS a little cramped but I like typing on it more than the macbook.

I think getting rid of the numpad probably isn't something they're going to be willing to do, as a lot of creatives will use it for workflow enhancement with certain types of production software. People in the PC space are probably more used to this than people using Macs, obviously. I could definitely live with it if they removed it, but I do like that it's there in the rare occasions it comes in handy. But those occasions are rare enough I don't think it would really be a deal breaker for me.

I don't use the touchpad much at all. The times I do use it I really am not bothered at all by it's positioning. It tracks nicely and the clicks have a good feel. It's no macbook touchpad, but not much is. It's close enough for my needs though.

The bottom line though is not these comparisons between the MacBook Pro 15 and the Gram 17. The real comparison for me picking between or recommending to someone the Gram 17 vs an MBP 15 is which ecosystem works best for you. I like playing games in my spare time, and there's no better place to do that than Windows 10, and bootcamp isn't good enough for me in that respect. As an eGPU user, it's way easier and more convenient to use an eGPU on a real Windows 10 platform than bootcamp. I can also use Linux for nearly everything I care about macOS for, so I dual boot. If the things you want to do lend themselves really well to the macOS ecosystem, then that would probably be a big part of the decision over any hardware differences. The fact that this Gram is so light and has such a nice display panel are a lot of reasons to go this route if the ecosystem itself doesn't matter to you. It's really about what your needs are. If using the Gram 17 is going to be a daily fight because you are so used to macOS and what that provides for you it's probably not going to end well.

 

Does anyone have any problem with display scaling? With 17" display at 2560x1600 resolution, one needs to adjust the scaling percentage higher than 100% otherwise everything would be too small. Do you have any problem with some apps not look right because of the scaling?

 

I have scaling set to 150%. The results depend on the applications you are using. Windows has improved a lot in recent years, but older apps still look blurry sometimes. However this is not related to the Gram17 at all, it's the same for all newer high-res laptops. Just check whether the software you intend you use supports windows display scaling.

 

with windows 10 there should be no problems. when a app do not scale, you will have this problem on every hidpi display. My work around for linux/ubuntu is setting up system font size and some needed apps manually. Bowser standard zoom 140%, IDE font size, increase ubuntu taskbar size...
You can scale this very precise. I like it.

 

I have had very few display scaling issues, if any, in Windows 10. Come to think of it I'm trying really hard to remember specifically the last app I had this problem with and I can't recall which one it was. It's way better than it used to be, and Windows ability to handle old legacy apps or apps that are not using modern techniques is much better than it used to be.

I've found Linux support hit and miss. A lot of DE's don't have very good support for fractional scaling, which is really required by this display as 2x is far too large. I've found the best support so far using Deepin DE. GNOME seems to not work correctly with browsers causing them to look like interpolated scaling. Both Chrome and Firefox look sharp and correctly scaled in Deepin. I've only had one app look strange, and it appears to be one that tries to handle scaling on it's own, then Deepin scales it further, looking a little too large. But it's fine in the case of this particular app.

I think we're going to have to go through a couple more years of changes and attempts at standardization before we see support for HiDPI scaling properly implemented in Linux across a wide array of DE's and apps. Such is the problem of Linux on the desktop though. A large amount of power, choice, customizability and configurability with a steep learning curve.

 

I recently picked up an MSI laptop, but I'm probably going to return it. I bought it because I got a good deal on it and I thought it looked cool. The battery life is pretty bad on it, though, and I have experienced a number of weird glitches. I'm thinking the 17" Gram is probably a better choice for my needs. I am not a gamer or power user. The laptop will be used mostly for productivity, web browsing, and occasional videos on YouTube, Netflix, etc ... The most important things to me are battery life, screen brightness/clarity, and the quality of the keyboard and touchpad. Do you think this laptop would be a better choice for me? Is there anything I should be aware of before taking the plunge?

 

For your needs it would work swimmingly well.

 

I agree. But.. if it's about the laptop in your signature, then you should be aware that the gram17 has a lot less performance, especially on the GPU side. The 1660ti in that MSI is a beast.

I own a MSI GS72 with a 4k screen and this one came with a matte screen, so maybe your MSI also has a matte a screen and the Gram17 does not.

Comparing my two 17'' I prefer the Gram17 overall as it's a lot lighter, has much better battery life and I like the keyboard much better. Also I prefer the 16:10 screen aspect ratio.

On my MSI I prefer the way cooling is implemented and the screen quality (a bit). I really never could get myself to like those MSI steelseries keyboards although I tried hard. They are mechanically well done, but the font is quite ugly and somehow the keys feel too slippery to me. On my machine the keyboard backlight flickers and if set to white you can still see red/green/blue leds shine through. But the real killer is the extremely short battery life caused by a too small battery and some software issues I could never nail down. It seems to never enter the deeper power saving modes.
I have an egpu for the Gram 17 running a desktop 1660ti and it still gets easily beaten by the MSI's 1060.
Another thing to consider is the huge power brick those MSI machines come with. It feels like that msi power brick alone is heavier than the Gram17 . USB-C charging on the Gram17 is another plus for me.

.. and the trackpad on my msi drove me nuts. It just doesn't register very small movements and that makes it painful to use.

 

Unbox Therapy seems to show that the trackpad gives away too much at 3m 03s

also the keyboard flexed a bit at 2m 03s

Does your unit have this problem?

————————————————————————————
Also, from another review I have seen, the screen flexed a lot.

At 2m 06s

Would you feel comfortable putting this laptop in a backpack?

 

I had some minor movement when dragging on the trackpad, but fixed it by inserting paper at just the right spots. Clicking on the trackpad is kind of deep, but that's a matter of taste and what is good is that it is possible to click on top as well.
For such a light machine I think the amount of flex of everything is more than acceptable. There are also videos of people running cars over LG grams without destroying them and I think that would apply to the Gram 17 as well - not that I have tried it. But I definitely have no problem putting the laptop in my backpack (inside a sleeve to prevent dust from entering and scratches from happening).

TBH I wouldn't trust either of these two reviewers on youtube when it comes to do serious laptop reviews, too much 'tainment and not enough edu .

 

I was just going by the "i'm not a gamer or power user". I'm not even sure what the 1660Ti is good for in that case.

 

I took it across the country with me in a backpack, I would trust it with zero reservations. The magnesium alloy the chassis is made of might feel plasticy next to a Razer Blade or MacBook, but it is durable. Obviously you don't want to just wrench the display with a lot of force. If you feel like it's a little too flexible you can put one of those ShaggyMax screen protectors in there when you close it. Doubles as a cleaning cloth for the display as well. https://www.shaggymax.com/

 

Yes absolutely true, I was just making the point because this is an huge difference between the MSI GP75 and the LG Gram 17. It's going from a system that can play any current game at very high settings to one that can play no current 3d game at any settings without egpu. And if 3d performance is needed in the future, the Gram17 won't do well unless an egpu is purchased and even with the best egpu it's still going to be inferior to the GP75. Besides gaming this will make a difference for video encoding, 3D rendering and some simulation-type workloads.

 

I am going to take a risk and bet.. well nothing at all but whatever.. that my 2070 eGPU on the Gram will most likely outperform anything that mobile 1660Ti can achieve in that unit. I'll even give it an advantage that I'm running everything on the internal display. In modern games anyway. That CPU would probably put it ahead in older stuff where the GPU isn't a limiter. It might not be very obvious without benchmarks though, also that 144Hz panel might make the whole experience better.

It's probably much louder, it's also heavier, I'm guessing it's probably decent color accuracy as well with a modern 144Hz panel. I would imagine my setup was probably overall a lot more expensive as since I didn't get the Gram on a sale I paid $2800 for everything.. Gram, Sonnet Breakaway, Strix 2070 OC (It's a more expensive 2070 but I wanted assurance it would be dead quiet) and the 6.6ft active cable.

I suppose comparing the two apples-to-apples isn't really valid as they aren't built for the same use case. But if no games will ever be played that 1660Ti is wasting away and robbing battery when it engages for no reason. I literally never hook up my eGPU unless I am going to play a game, the UHD 620 does everything else really well. I was even able to play the odd low intensity game just fine before I bought the eGPU, not that I would ever suggest that to someone as a benefit, it's literally the bottom of the barrel.

 

Can you run any game at 2560x1600@60 Hz on the internal screen? I know my 1660Ti would be perfectly capable of doing that for many games, but at this resolution it has a hard time going over 50 fps. I see GPU/CPU are not maxed out, but still can't get the 60Hz I'd like to get. Lower resolutions are fine, so I'm quite sure this is the result of the thunderbolt connection and the heaps of data going both ways when the internal display is used. On an external display I can run the same games at 4k@60Hz, but for the internal one I have to go to 1920x1200 or 1080p to get a smooth experience and that's why I think using faster video cards than let's say a 1060gtx is not going to bring much benefit for the internal display.
Internal GPUs have 4 times the bandwidth and don't need bidirectional data flow. Can you max out the 2070 on the internal display at native res?

 

60 at native on the internal display is probably going to be hard to achieve consistently. I've just been going by how the game feels to play more than watching an FPS counter. Let me play a couple of my installed games and see what the actual FPS is. I've been playing pretty much everything at native res with details cranked high. I'll throw an edit on this post when I get some data.

EDIT:
This is all at native resolution, and the games I have installed right now that might matter.

Metro: Last Light. This was pegged at 60 with pretty much everything cranked to max in nearly every situation. There was a "cinematic sequence" with a ton of people around where it was dipping into the 50's here and there, probably due to the number of objects on screen. The rest of the time it was at 60 (I had vsync on).

Divinity: OS 2: Obviously pegged to 60 at max, not sure why I even tried this.

RAGE 2: This was interesting. I had to turn off vsync to get it to stay at 50 or so. I would dip into the 40's sometimes. But most of the time it was at 48-55. Max details across the board. It would lock at 40 pretty much with vsync on, probably factorial of the refresh. This game seemed smoother with vsync off obviously. There was zero tearing I could see. I probably should have played this with vsync off, but I played the whole game with it on. Still really liked it, so, no regrets. In the future I'll probably try games with vsync off first and only turn it on if I see tearing. I'm very averse to tearing, I hate it.

Metro: Exodus:
Unfortunately neither the game or the xbox game bar have an FPS counter like steam does. I don't have Afterburner+RTSS installed or I would have checked that. Let me try that and I'll edit again.. I'm playing it max details and RTX on high.

 

Thanks for the benches. Unfortunately the only game of these I have is Metro Exodus and it's not installed on the Gram17 because I don't have RTX on that. The game I tried the most is Forza Horizon 4 and even at 1080p, frame rates sometimes go down to 50fps on internal only. I also tried the Devil May Cry 5 and am unable to play at full res and 60 Hz. It could of course also be a problem with my egpu box. I have a case-modded akitio node 3, and there was a firmware update to increase thunderbolt bandwidth 2x for it, but maybe it's still not performing as it theoretically could. I did check 4 lanes support with cuda-z and it seemed ok, but maybe there is a latency problem. My main reasons to suspect the connection for the low rates are not maxing the GPU and the fact that changing the graphics settings to low also doesn't move things to 60 fps most times.

 

Hi, I have similar needs and a smaller korean version (i3 ...). No problems so far, youtube etc. also 4k on vimeo.com.
Display is excellent. And it is silent and not 'huge'. Very pleasant to work with. I hope lg will have success, and others
will start to build also build simular notebooks.

 

So I took a few screenshots. Asus GPU Tweak II ended up having an OSD, but it didn't work with Metro Exodus or Forza Demo (probably because Win Store?) so I had to turn on GeForce Experience or the internal FPS counter.

Metro: Last Light Redux



Rage 2



Metro Exodus (RTX on High, Hairworks off obvs... There's probably more demanding areas but this is where I am in the game)


Forza Horizon 4 demo winter seemed to perform the worst, it was in the 40s a lot, 1600p ULTRA preset

 

I'm kind of interested in if they will upgrade the cooling a little if they release a refresh of the Gram 17 at year end or early next year with the new 10th gen 10nm Ice Lake CPUs. The boost in iGPU power is interesting, as well as the integrated TB3 support which should make that more efficient.

 

I just noticed that the Asus Tweak II software was constantly using like 6-7% CPU when it was running, not sure if that colored some of the results in my performance..

 

In Horizon 4 I'm getting a solid 60fps on 1920x1200, but check out the 2560x1600 screenshot:



46 fps, but only 68% GPU usage . That's why I think for this game at native res, the bottleneck is TB3 or my enclosure.

 

That's odd, well I got 43FPS at 1600 ULTRA preset in that one heaviest area of the winter part of the demo, so it doesn't seem the GPU really makes a difference at all even though mine is at much higher usage. It does seem to vary enough that it's hard to tell exactly where it is at any one time. I can get high 50's to 60 in other areas though. I definitely noticed winter and whatever season the mud season was... spring? were the two worst performers of the 4.

I uninstalled it or I'd try again with the HIGH preset or something..

 

I'm not getting 60fps stable at 1600p in horizon 4 even with the low preset. And my cpu is not maxed out at all.

 

I decided to return the MSI and bought the 17" gram instead (I need to update my signature). So far, I agree with you that it is perfect for my needs.

I realize I gave up a lot in the performance department, but I honestly think I am much better off with the LG. The battery life on the gram absolutely destroys the MSI. This is a huge factor for me.

Yeah, that power brick that came with the MSI was extremely heavy. I much prefer the smaller one that came with the gram. I'd love to be able to charge it via the USB-C port as well. Is there a particular charger that you recommend?

I agree. The trackpad on the gram is WAY better. I just wish I could figure out a way to enable coasting. On my old HP laptop, there was a Synaptics control panel which allowed you to fine tune much more settings. I don't see anything like this on the LG. Am I missing something?

 

The Gram trackpad, and frankly a lot of trackpads these days, use Microsoft precision drivers. The best you can get is go to the Touchpad section of the settings and tweak things there. I just use whatever the default is, seems ok.

I would say any USB-C charger that can supply at least 35W is probably fine. I think @Pflugshaupt had found this earlier in the thread, it looks nice and small and provides plenty of power. http://www.myinnergie.com/sg/product/136

 

That innergie charger... I was actually asking whether anyone knows it is compatible, and so far this is not confirmed. It's quite expensive, so I don't want to take any chances.

 

It's also pretty expensive, I'd just get a different one. I think any of them that does USB-C PD and is at least 40-50W will probably be fine.

 

1. For a non-gamer, what do you feel are the biggest drawbacks of the LG gram 17?

2. Are there specific situations where you find yourself using the laptop when you would not have before due to its weight? Bed/couch/etc?

 

1. Maybe finding room to use it while on a flight? If you aren't a gamer there's not much to complain about. Maybe the lack of an nvme drive as a standard, but it's questionable if you'd really notice that in day-to-day usage anyway. I'm guessing unless someone broke out some benchmarks or was using an application that has super heavy disk i/o you wouldn't notice. For someone that doesn't care about games I can't really find any reason to say it has a drawback. If you're already looking at a 17", you probably don't mind that the footprint of the unit is at least that big. It's not a much bigger footprint than a MacBook Pro 15 though. I'd say the biggest drawback of this unit that people complain about is trying to use it outside in the sun, but that is also true of any laptop with a glossy display. That doesn't affect me, but some people maybe.

2. Not really, I always use it sitting in a recliner, so there isn't much else to say. I don't take laptops to bed with me but it would work extremely well for that as it doesn't have any vents on the bottom.

 

1. To me, the biggest drawback was the heavy throttling under full load. I mainly use Visual Studio on the machine and compiling my projects would always run the CPU to its (low) thermal limit of 90C where performance is almost halved. If you don't do anything that requires lots of CPU power, that would be a non-issue, but I kept tinkering until the situation was improved, which turned out to be a lot harder than I initially thought. Now the only thing that bugs me occasionally is the slowish charging. If I forget to recharge it and then realize I have to leave the house in 30min, charging with just 30W is a problem and makes me use a different machine in those cases. And the numeric keypad annoys me a little as I find it useless with those tiny keys.

2. I use it everywhere now. I used to have very small and light machines to take with me (ThinkPad X series, MacBook 12, Huawei Matebook X 12''), but they are no longer needed now that I have the Gram17 which isn't much heavier, but so much more comfortable and powerful. I also use it at home a lot where I used to work on my desktop machine, but the Gram17 screen is large enough so I don't miss the screen real estate of the desktop. The weight is low enough to carry it around with one hand, so I just carry the Gram around wherever I go and end up coding a lot in the kitchen where the coffee is.

 

I had never bothered to do any monitoring of CPU usage while gaming, I was a little happy to see it was up in the 3GHz+ range a lot when I did throw some OSD monitoring up, of course this isn't while compiling, encoding a video or rendering a scene. And as well I'm cranking details up so everything is GPU bound. As we've all seen in stock configuration it definitely has a modest 15W ceiling when torturing it with cinebench. I have a feeling most people won't notice this.

 

I can't wait

 

I mostly agree, but I had one case where everybody would notice it. I transcoded a movie with Handbrake and not only did it take quite a long time, but it also led to an extremely hot laptop as it was running full tilt with thermal throttling (without cooler mods) for about one hour. It became very apparent that the cooling system cannot even handle the 15W the CPU is limited to. It seems to be capable of about 14 W and that means eventually a whole section of the machine reaches insane temperatures if you do something that keeps the load at 100%. It feels like the cooling was designed for the i3 variant which is only available in Korea. I would vastly prefer if power throttling would kick in before thermal throttling does, but that's not the case.

I would still recommend the laptop to anyone who wants a large and light machine - there is no comparable machine on the market. But if you ask me what's the biggest problem with it, then the thermal stuff is it. So maybe my recommendation would include installing throttlestop to undervolt the CPU and to lower the power limit.

 

Suffering personally from very hot European weather currently, I can state the machine is ideal for carrying around with one hand while holding a cold beer in the other hand .

Btw. I ordered that innergie 60c usb-c charger now. It just feels like the perfect companion because it is super light (&small). I'll post about it once it arrives and hopefully works.

 

For someone like me, I honestly don't see many drawbacks. I've now owned the gram for about the same amount of time that I owned the MSI, and it's a way better laptop for my purposes. I suppose some people might find the glossy screen on the LG to be a drawback, but it doesn't bother me. It's very bright and crisp, and I really like the 16:10 aspect ratio. The MSI had a 1920x1080 screen. I prefer the higher resolution screen on the LG, but it does have one downside. You need to use scaling in Windows to make things large enough to see comfortably, but some programs and apps don't scale well and can look a bit blurry. I also kind of miss the full RGB backlit keyboard on the MSI. That thing was really cool, but I do think the keyboard on the LG is actually better for typing.

Because of the weight and superb battery life, I find myself taking the gram everywhere. I use it in bed, on the couch, at the kitchen table, take it to Starbucks, etc ...The weight is truly a thing of beauty. People are absolutely shocked by how light it is when I hand it to them.

 

This is a great point. I would recommend that anyone that wants to get a laptop like this but encode video occasionally look into a modest eGPU. Even a lower priced GPU like a 1650/1660/RX570/RX580 would run circles around the Gram at these tasks. Same for doing Blender work or whatever. If it's your primary use case and you need to do these things on the go, the Gram is probably not for you. I've been able to put up with it's compilation time since I can just do something else in the meantime. I don't do massive builds often though, I can just do that stuff on a compute instance in the cloud and not have to worry about how fast my local CPU is.

If you are looking into something super light that can maybe do a little better job at GPU related tasks maybe the Samsung Notebook 9 (15" 16:9) or Huawei Matebook X Pro (14" 4:3) with those lower powered nvidia MX class chips. Outside of that (unless I've forgotten a ~3lb notebook with a GPU) you're looking at adding about 1.5lbs to the weight to get into nvidia 1600 class territory.

 

Hi All,

My know how in linux is limited, I have a LG Gram 17 I have install with dual boot Opensuse Tumbleweed, with Kernel 5.1.10-1, Plasma 5.16.2, Frameworks 5.99, and qt 5.13.0
I'm trying to use the special keys function as is described in:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/laptops/lg-laptop.rst

But I don't understand what is the command line to use, also I'm trying to use this plasmoid to control the battery charge limit, but it seams don't work.

https://github.com/jsalatas/plasma-pstate

You can help mi on that?
Thankyou very much