New LG Gram 17

Which major US retailers have LG Gram 17 on display? Best buy sell them online but they don’t have them on display.

 

Costco

 

The driver doesn't currently work fully. I sent some info to the developer but I haven't heard back.

 

I don't have problems on Ubuntu 19.04 except for the disable mouse function and the reader function. Brightness, Sleep, Airplane mode and Mute and Volume work for me.

I use "sudo nano /sys/devices/platform/lg-laptop/fn_lock" and change the value to 1 to set the special keys as primary and it works.

 

It work for you the battery limit? and the fan mode? How you do it?

Thank you

 

The LG Gram support page shows new firmware dated yesterday July 3rd for among other items the LG Update Center for LG Notebook.(Ver.1.0.1810.1701). Has anyone utilized this new driver set (if it is even new) and does it allow for the use to two SSD's of different manufacturer and size? I am hoping that a driver update can resolve the issues that early adopters had earlier this year. I want to buy this from Costco tomorrow and add a new 1 or 2 tb drive and keep the existing 256gb ssd on board. Thank you for any insights.

I really appreciate the effort that so many of you have put in and shared on how to optimize this notebook.

 

I use the drivers straight from Intel, so the wireless driver and LAN driver from LG don't interest me. Not sure why that realtek LAN driver is even included there is no LAN controller that I see unless it's there and they never integrated it. They give you a USB Ethernet adapter in the box, none of those ever require drivers that I recall. I did download the newer LG Update Center and ran that, it showed no new updates much like the existing one I have installed.

I have two different brand and size SATA SSD's installed and I don't think it's causing any issues, doesn't appear to be anyway. There's always a chance there could be some incompatibility with a specific m.2 SSD brand and firmware revision, whether it be SATA or NVMe, I suppose. Someone was having an issue with it earlier in the thread.

I do not see any BIOS updates, so I doubt that it's been fixed if running two different SSD size/brand concurrently is a compatibility problem. Is it perhaps just a specific brand being a problem or has it been reported widely with many different brands/sizes?

EDIT: sorry I forgot, my drives are two different brands, but they are both 512GB.. I thought one was 500GB for a minute.

 

I've not used those features.

 

Is there a way to unlock the hidden BIOS settings on this gram 17?

There's a thread here for the 15: https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-Question-Extract-LG-Gram-Phoenix-Secure-Core-Bios

The BIOS strings exported in that thread have options for software RAID among other settings.

 

Hi, I use also Ubuntu 19.04. Brightness, volumen, sleep works here, without any changes. But I have small problems with the trackpad, every 5 minutes, it stops working for 2 secounds.
do you have any problems here?

battery works in ubuntu 19.04 fine. battery level and remaining time is displayed correctly. There is also a standby mode if you do nothing for ~ 10min. the fan
is totaly silent, except I look at youtube 1440p60 videos or some other demanding stuff. a super quiet notebook. almost silent

 

The battery level and remaining time it works well for me, but if I want to put the limit at 80% charging to preserve the battery didn't work

 

It's probably possible, but you'd have to ask someone with the knowledge to do it on bios-mods - and probably pay them. I read there is not that much to unlock, so I didn't go for it. As this involves decryption and re-encryption and tweaks to make windows keep its activation it's a lengthy task that will only result in a modded bios for one specific machine.

I am running a 1 TB Samsung 970 EVO+ and a 2TB Intel 660p at the same time in mine and do not have any issues at all. Maybe running one NVME and one SATA drive is problematic, but I think the reported issues at the beginning of the thread where just one faulty machine, not a general problem.

 

Hey Experts IF you were to buy your LG Gram 17 today what would you do first?
1. Would you upgrade to 16GB (24gb) or a 32gb (40gb)?
2. Would you buy two new M.2 SSD's and ghost over a copy of the existing disk image
OR would you just do a clean install to a fresh new SSD?
3. Heat transfer strips on the SODIMM or the SSD's or leave as is?

thanks for sharing your ideas.

Best, Tom

 

2. Probably buy two of these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P7TFKR...olid=3PVFWK3XB9JZY&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

I wouldn't bother with 1 or 3, and the install is pretty much clean there's not a whole lot of cruft that isn't simple to uninstall. Unless you desperately need more than 16GB of RAM for some reason.

 

1) Only if you have reason to believe 16 GB is not enough.

2) Better buy one large NVME SSD and use that. The second slot has 2 lanes only and this way you'd have a slot left for future (=cheaper) SSDs. Or use the sata it came with in the second slot until you need more space.

2.b) I'd check if the machine comes with the latest windows (1903) and if not, I'd do a clean wipe and install windows 1903 directly. Otherwise you'll have to do a lengthy update soonish.

3) I don't think it is necessary. There is some airflow where the SSDs are and the ram doesn't really get hot. Maybe if you are working with large movies, checking SSD temps would be a good idea.

 

How much hotter do the NVMe drives run? I'm thinking about swapping out the factory SSD for a 970 PRO or EVO Plus, but I'm worried about potential heat issues.

 

It depends on the task. AFAIK those samsung drives can get quite hot if you keep writing terrabytes to them without taking any breaks. You still won't get real issues, they will just throttle down once they reach a certain temperature. Here's an article about this for the evo 970: http://www.cdrlabs.com/reviews/sams...ve/thermal-throttling-and-final-thoughts.html.

In the article, after writing 800 GB the drive reaches 79 C and starts slowing down (but still stays quite fast). As I had to open my machine anyway I added 2mm thermal pads to my SSDs so some heat could move away to the backside of the case. I am not sure how effective this is. Maybe I should run a test.

 

That pad contacting the chassis is a fix for a lot of SSD throttling in many units, if you can stand the increase in chassis surface temp.

 

I often have the machine on my lap, so increased surface temperature on the bottom wouldn't be ideal.

 

As long as you don't write gigabytes at a time you probably won't notice the heat. If you do, put something in between the lap and the machine.
I also added graphite sheets to the inside of the chassis which spread the heat a bit.
Or just don't add pads and accept some ssd thermal throttling in some cases.

 

I received that expensive innergie usb-c 60w charger yesterday. I ordered it on eBay from Taiwan. It took me almost two days to run my battery to 0%, but now I am able to take a few measurements.

the charger seems nicely made and it really is unbelievably small, like two packets of matches. However it weighs 99g, so there is some heft to it, it almost feels like solid rock. A 40W charger I have from Huawei is a bit lighter (80g), although it's larger and less powerful.

It does charge just fine. My watt meter reads 42W when charging an almost empty battery with the laptop asleep.

Now to the weird parts. It comes with a strangely large usb-c cable with an enormous ferrite bead. That's kinda weird as the device is so small. No worries for me, I'll just use the Huawei cable without bead, but definitely odd for people with no good usb-c cable.

What's much more annoying is the fact the charger produces a "usb device not recognized" warning when plugged in. At one point windows installed a driver for it and then things were ok for a while, but today I'm getting this warning again and needing a driver for a charger seems totally strange - especially if there is nothing to be gained from the driver. It would be nice if this would allow to monitor the charging or something like that, but that doesn't seem to be the case and there is no mention of a driver anywhere.

Would I buy the thing again. Probably not.
I think we'll soon get many more small usb-c chargers with this new kind of tech, probably for less and without strange things included.

 

Not quite sure what this is, Windows Update just installed it, Windows 10 1903

 

I agree with you wholeheartedly! I am very curious how virtualbox is working for you because I noticed that VT-x is disabled and the UEFI has no place to enable it. Have you figured out how to turn it on?

 

VT-x is on in mine. I have Hyper-V running no problems. MSInfo32 shows Virtualization-based security as Running. Virtualization: Enabled shows on the Performance page in Task Manager.

Tests here: https://www.shaileshjha.com/how-to-...windows-8-windows-vista-or-windows-7-machine/

 

Same here, it's working on mine as well.

 

Ok good to know. I'll upgrade to Win Pro shortly. Have you noticed any difference in performance when you're running VMs on the gram vs a more powerful laptop/desktop?

 

Some EGPU news. Today I bought a Razer Core X to replace the Akitio Node Thunderbold3 I have been using and the switch seems to be extremely worthwhile.

I got the akitio node used for cheap and that's why I started out with it, but I got annoyed by its power delivery and performance issues. EGPU enclosures have different amounts of power they can feed through thunderbolt and the akitio node was one of the 15W PD class. This meant that during gaming the Gram17 would most of the time slowly discharge because 15W isn't enough to power the machine and charge at the same time (especially with my 30W CPU mods). So I had to use the barrel plug charger whenever I used my EGPU and this gets old quickly as it means two of everything. Now with the razer core x that can deliver 100W through thunderbolt these problems are a thing of the past and the battery even gets charged with a few watts during gaming. It is important to consider that the Gram17 will never pull more than 30W from thunderbolt. This means charging is slow during gaming, but at least it is not running out of battery power.

Performance-wise I see much better things with the core x. I'm not yet sure why, but I am guessing it is related to the thunderbolt firmware on the thunderbolt chip. I realized that the akitio node uses quite old firmware (r25) and chose the core x specifically for its much newer firmware (r40). Unfortunately it seems most manufacturers do not update their old EGPU enclosures with the latest firmware. This is definitely something to watch out for as this whole technology is still young.

The Razer Core X uses a mostly standard ATX power supply and after I disassembled it I'm now able to run it with a smaller SFX power supply. I will move to a flex-atx supply and build a new case around my 1660Ti and then I'll have a small and powerful solution.

To sum up.. better thoroughly compare the available EGPU-enclosures before choosing one for the gram17. There are big differences.

 

LG 17U790 w/1650 (35w or 50w?)
(Notegear Korean engineering sample preview video.)
11:50 keyboard (full size arrow keys)
14:40 mass (adds 0.6kg)
16:30 interior

 

Thanks for posting that! It adds a little over a pound to the total weight (2.9lb vs 4.2lb) but not a bad showing. Retaining that same 16:10 panel was smart.

I'd still rather see them refresh the existing Gram 17 with:

• CPU upgrade:
  • Next Gen U series (i7 10565U?). Best features are built in and potentially more performant TB3, slightly more efficient perf/watt
  • better iGPU. This would probably stop me from hooking up the eGPU for some lighter weight games if it truly is 1.5x to 3x perf over the 620 HD graphics. The 620 just isn't up to snuff sometimes for 1600p on lower intensity games. Hopefully they go for the Iris angle, but I guess if they improved the bottom tier (720?) that might be just enough. Not sure exactly what will be available.
• Heat management:
  • better heat sink and pipe, they could do this without adding significantly to the weight
  • Continue to keep the fan(s) quiet. maybe adding another fan and having them spin a little slower would work
  • there's a LOT of room in there on the 17. I really think they could do something with the cooling in the 17 with all that room without sacrificing noise. Hopefully they don't continue to save pennies and re-use the same solution from the 14 and 15. It's REALLY handicapping the performance of the 17.
• MAYBE ditch the numpad but I don't really care much about that, keyboard is fine after 2-4 weeks of muscle memory building
• I know some people that use it in bright lights/outside will want a matte panel, but I don't like how matte panels affect the clarity. Maybe give an option for both?

I'm perfectly happy to continue to leave the GPU as an eGPU and keep the ~3lb weight. I use it for non-gaming much more often than gaming, but this is just my preference. I see room for both models.

I just have this feeling they are going to continue to cut corners in order to use the the same mainboard and and heat management in order to use the solution across the entire Gram line and the 17 will just end up being handicapped. Also they are probably doing it just to make sure they can shave every milligram of weight off it that they can. Hopefully I'm wrong. I'd take another 50-150 grams to improve the perf.

 

Another Costco Gram17 purchaser here. Costco was the cheapest option, mainly because of having a smaller SSD, which was going to be replaced anyway. I gave our son my aging XPS 15, which had been upgraded well past the point of sanity and was still a great machine, but definitely showing its age, which gave me the excuse to get the GRAM.

I immediately upgraded, in fact, had them waiting on my desk when I unboxed the Gram, the drive to a 1 TB 970 EVO+, and added a 16 Gig DRAM to go to 24 Gig. I sure wish I had found this thread first, as everything I saw said adding a 16 was the max, now that I know I can add a 32 I probably will do that in the near future. I also have a Caldigit TS3 Plus Thunderbolt 3 hub that everything is plugged in to, it also powers the laptop, and the power adapter that came with the Gram stays in my backpack. The only thing plugged directly into the laptop, besides the Thunderbolt 3 cable for the hub, is a Logitech nano adapter for my keyboard.

It is interesting that this Laptop is drawing a lot of developers, I am also a software developer, but I do large scale business / DB software, using 5GL tools, so a lot different world that the Linux/java, VS world most of the other posters discuss.

I also work quite differently, I started doing some international travel last year and didn't like the idea of having lots of client databases, etc. on my machine, so I have set up a desktop machine as my primary machine, that I remote into to do all work. Let me explain a bit further the desktop doesn't have a monitor, I have a headless 4K video adapter on it so it thinks it is hooked to a 4K 60hz Monitor. I think remote into that, even when at my desk I remote into it. I use Wayk Now for remote access.

So my desktop setup is a 23 inch 1920x1080 screen, that I have all my "communication" stuff on, Gmail, WhatsApp, chime, my time tracking software, etc. And I have a 43 4K monitor that is displaying my development desktop via Wayk Now. The laptop screen is disabled and I set the laptop vertical, with the back (fan vents) up.

This setup keeps all my day to day stuff on the laptop so I can toss it in the backpack and head out and not worry about having to move things are or keep them in sync. And any development I just remote into the desktop.

At this point, you might wonder why I even need a laptop with decent power, other than to drive an HD and a 4K monitor, and that is because from time to time, when I am presenting a seminars, teaching, etc. I will run my development environment natively on the laptop, but 90% of the time it is sort of a dumb terminal with just day to day apps on it.

Now on to my issues and questions.

I run into the .33Ghz throttling a lot, especially if I open up a few chrome tabs on the 4K monitor, not running videos, just doing general programming research, Facebooking, etc.

I have tried XTU with every combination imaginable and all I seem to be able to accomplish is change what triggers the throttle, Current, Power, or Thermal. I had a bit of luck under-volting the CPU by .90, it didn't seem stable any more than that, and I wasn't able to get any under-volting of the GPU without it being unstable, disabling short turbo and setting the turbo to between 18-25, but I still run into .39Ghz way more than I feel I should especially since I am not doing "that" much directly on the laptop.

I uninstalled XTU today and downloaded Throttle Stop to see if maybe I could get better control of it, but I haven't read the guide all the way through to get started on it yet, I am hoping someone here can suggest a starting place for the Gram 17 and Throttle Stop.

Now for the bizarre, and hopefully it will trigger some ideas with this group, this weekend was my first time using the laptop remotely. So I was using the laptop screen, I adjusted my desktop to match the resolution. And the machine absolutely flew for the few hour development session I did on it. I wasn't monitoring it, but I can guarantee you it never dipped down anywhere near .33.

I have since done some playing here at home, and have found that if I use the laptop screen instead of the 1920x1080 screen, I don't experience as much throttling. I thought maybe the case just wasn't designed well to run closed, so I opened up the case (built-in monitor still disabled) and that didn't help. It also doesn't seem to matter if I run the monitor from T3 Hub (via a display link USB3 adapter), or via the internal HDMI port of the laptop. As soon as I use the HD external monitor I start having more noticeable throttling. This really doesn't make sense to me, I hope maybe it rings a bell with someone. The way have my external monitors and desk configured, it is really not convenient to use the laptops, internal monitor, instead, so I would really like to solve this. If not I have going to have to reconfigure my desk and use the laptop's monitor, which waste a lot of desk space since I won't be using its keyboard. I spend most of my time looking at and working on the 4k monitor with an external keyboard and mouse. Just checking emails etc. on the small screen.

And finally, there was some post about using thermal pads and something called graphene to transfer more of the heat to the case. But most weren't interested, as it makes the bottom of the laptop uncomfortable, but that wouldn't be an issue for me (I never use it on my lap, I am too old and fat for that!). The thermal pads are available on amazon but I couldn't find the graphene, Any more information on where to get the graphene or simple mods to use the case as more of a heat sink I would love. I am ok adding a bit of weight to it but don't want to add a lot. And the heat tube, fan mods, etc. are way beyond what I would be comfortable doing.

Thanks for all the work and information already share in the thread, I will go back and reread it all again tomorrow but in the meantime, if anyone can give me some suggested setting to start within Throttle Stop and info/suggestions on the case as a heatsink mod, please do.

 

Text review of engineering preview sample. [Korean. Suggest Chrome Browser for inline translation as you scroll, after page loads.]
(First page is mostly history of Gram and UltraGear.)
CPU heat pipe goes to both fans [good when GPU not in use].
GPU shares CPU pipe, adds another.
Gaming: Throttles 10-15% after 50 min. [63dB in-game is LOUD, even 50 is Loud. Where was it measured? What is ambient background?]
Battery: over 12hrs playing video with wifi off. [intel has hardware decoder, so this may not use CPU or GPU much.]

 

The panasonic graphene sheets are available on digikey. They are pricey and can't help a lot with heat build-up over time. It does work for short therm turbo clocks. I'm not sure I'd use them again for this machine. I think of all the mods I did, the one that helped the most for the least amount of trouble was increasing the heat fin surface area. I did it by adding some fins I bought on aliexpress and attaching them to the existing fins with said graphene, but other heat conducting things like copper tape should work as well. There is already extra room in the case and anything you can think of that increases the fin area will help. I think that's the weakest point.

If you want to see what the machine could do without throttling I recommend taking off the bottom cover and putting the machine on a stand and a strong fan below to cool things down. This should allow an unmodified gram17 to run without throttling - if the fan moves enough air. You could add a few heat spreaders to the heatpipe to make this even more efficient. Of course that's not a portable solution, but it'll allow you to see if those 0.33 gHZ you are seeing are indeed a thermal issue. I never saw anything like that on mine.

With throttlestop the first thing you need to do is install the extra drivers on its fivr page. Once installed, enable "disable and lock turbo power limits" on said fivr page. Then you can tweak the power settings on the tpl page. Most important are Turbo Boost Long Power Max and PP0 Current Limit. To avoid thermal throttling you need to find value for these that will limit power in a way that the cpu doesn't reach 90 C. Which ones need to be tweaked depends on the workload. I tweaked these and looked at the main window package power until it stayed where I needed it (on stock probably 14W, on mine with dual fans 30W). The hopefully thermal throttling will be gone and crazy downclocks won't happen any longer.

 

Thanks for the info Pflugshaupt. I will take a look at the fin area, and see if I feel I can do something there without getting "too crafty"

I am happy to say that after setting up Throttle stop today.
Undervolt CP/Cache = .80
Undervolt GPU = .50
Disable Short Turbo boost
Long Boost = 18
Multiplier = 19
Speed Shift = 64
BD ProChot = Off

I have been running my normal workload all day with an average temp of only 65c, and only 5 Thermal limits recorded in the logs, each lasting for 1 second. And my lowest Multiplier was 8.35, which if I understand everything is .83 gHz (Which I suspect were true idles). my Average multipler was 21.5. More importantly, I did experience any crazy slowdowns, like I have been where there is an obvious pause between pressing a key and it registering on the screen like I had when it was hitting .39.

Again my normal workload is not Processor heavy since the development is happening in a remote session, so it's mainly the ram and processing that Chrome and a few other tools is using.

If I run a benchmark with those settings I peg thermal throttling. While experimenting this AM, I noticed the fan issues that a few of you have mentioned. If I change my long boost to 15 or so and run a long benchmark, it pegs thermal for 4 or 5 seconds, then the fan finally decides to catch up, and it doesn't hit thermal again for 45 seconds or so. I really hope someone finds a way to control the fan, that would be ideal for my normal use. I can't hear the thing at all, so I would be happy with it running full blast when I am in AC/Performance mode.

 

I forgot to mention I will have to read up on PPO Current limit, that isn't one I have read about yet, so I haven't tweaked it, mine is 71 as a default. So not sure what that is telling me or what type of increments I should test with.

 

I have the current limit at 40 which limits my cpu to 30W when doing Prime95. With the power limit totally removed my cpu otherwise draws 45W in Prime95 and then the machine just shuts down. The value is related to the max amperes going to the processor. Usually the power limit is enough - it is related to watts used.

Yes, fan control would indeed be nice, but I verified that even running the fan at full speed all the time cannot prevent long term thermal throttling. Running at full speed can be achieved by cutting the control wire on the fan connector. Or you can use the notebook fan control config I posted a lot earlier in the thread. Unfortunately it only works as long as the fan would stand still otherwise.

I have bypassed fan control by adding a microcontroller to control the fan based on a thermistor I added to the heat pipe as I found no way to overwrite the internal fan speed once it starts changing speeds.

 

For those interested in graphene sheets: Brad from brad's hacks found a new source on eBay. It seems someone in China sells them directly for about 1/3 the price. Just search for "1600W/mK graphite sheet" on eBay.

 

Thanks for the heads up Pflugshaupt!

I know you said they wouldn't help for long term cooling but I suspect for my normal workload it will help, so I went ahead and grabbed a sheet.

I am going to add a few of the thermal pads to the heat pipe and EVO+ to move the heat up to the case. Is 2mm thickness enough for contact with the graphene sheet on the case?

While I am in there, and remember I don't consider myself "crafty", should I repaste the CPU, if so do I need to use paste or would I be ok with one of the CPU graphite pads? Or should I just stay with stock pasting and not waste my time? Again not trying to squeeze out every last drop of the CPU. I would be pretty happy if I could have it reliably handle somewhere in 20-25W turbo. If I do repaste, I will be extra careful with the screws based on your experience, I sure as heck don't want to have a soldering iron anywhere near my motherboard!

I would be interested in adding fins the fan as long as I don't have to get crazy with modding. do you have a link to fins that pretty much fit the area?

BTW, day 2 without the any crazy downclocking! I am definitely getting better results with Throttle stop than I did with XTU. I might see if I can safely undervolt it a bit more sense it has been stable for 2 days on the current settings.

 

From my experiments I believe stock configuration is only able to handle about 14W of sustained power (over 5+ minutes).

2mm pads are thick enough for the SSD and the heat pipe. With the graphene you'll be easily able to see whether things touch as the pads leave marks on the graphene and get "pencil" marks from the graphene as well.

A repaste certainly is a good idea. As the mounting screws cannot be tightened a lot I think it's important not to use too much paste (unlike stock). There doesn't seem to be enough pressure to get rid of excess paste. I saw large deltas of core temps when I didn't apply the paste well. On my final attempt that I've been running since about two months now I used little paste and spread it using a credit card and then tried to have the same light pressure on all three screws. Now the core temp delta is 2 C or less. Before I saw differences of up to 12C.

Unfortunately I don't have a link to the fins. I ordered a few from aliexpress and shortened them (which is easy, just cut off the excess length). The main issue is the height. Initially I used a saw to make a few ram-chip-miniture-heatsinks fit.

My undervolt parameters are (on the i5 korean version):

CPU Core -106.4
CPU Cache -106.4
System Agent -106.4
Intel GPU -46.9
iGPU Unslice -46.9

I read that most cpus can have the cache setting lower than core, but haven't found the time to check this out. I used to run things at -110.4, but ran into instability once and am running the -106.4 ever since without issues.

 

Just installed my 32 GB Samsung M471A4G43MB1-CTD module I got on eBay for $114 in the LG gram 17. Works fine but runs only at 2400 MHz because of the 8 GB of built-in ram running at that speed.

 

I think the laptop probably only supports DDR4-2400 so I doubt it would run at any other speed.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...-8565u-processor-8m-cache-up-to-4-60-ghz.html (Memory specs section)

 

Does anyone know where to download the latest version of LG Control Center? The ones from the UK site is a few years old and does not have the latest controls. Thanks.

 

You need to go here https://www.lgservice.co.kr/download/selectSearchView.do (turn on translation) go the NOTEBOOK section and search for 17Z990. Select any model that appears, they all have the same software. You can download it from that list of software/drivers.

Hopefully that works. I think there's a US model and the Euro model, not sure if the Korean model is the same as one of those.

 

My 3 year old Alienware 13 R3 supported only 2400mhz memory and it runs at 2666 fine.

 

The LG gram 17 is now down to $1149 until 9/1 at Costco, which I think is an excellent deal for this laptop:
https://www.costco.com/LG-Gram-17-L...n-and-Light-at-2.95lbs.product.100485159.html

FYI, Costco increases the warranty to 2 years from the manufacturer's 1.

 

That's definitely a steal!

 

I'm thinking about replacing my Dell XPS 9550 with a Gram 17 and saw this offer shopping prices. I'm now considering joining Costco just for this offer. I'd be using the gram for general computing and software development (although most of these activities just require ssh'ing from laptop into remote servers, so I don't need a lot of horsepower, but screen real estate is more valuable.) There's so many things about the gram that answer my prayers... I just hope the keyboard is adequate and not too mushy..

I've got a 16GB DDR4-2400 left over from the XPS - my understanding is that I can install this into the Gram to achieve a total 24GB (since there's 8GB soldered onto mainboard). Is this correct?

I'd also be replacing the SSD as I understand the Gram's SSD is not great. Perhaps I'll swap the faster NVMe from the XPS (which has Win10Pro) with the Gram's.

 

Yes, you should be able to do both of those things. They keyboard is.. decent. Not the best.. not the worst. Probably will take a week or two to get used to.

 

Bought one! I' got the ram upgraded to 24Gb and am trying to install an Inland 1Tb nvme x4 SSD in the x4 slot in this thing and boot from a win10 install USB, but the new SSD isn't recognized..

 

Are you sure your SSD is good? For me it was just plug and play.

 

Nope, I'm not sure at all. I also put the inland SSD in my XPS 9550 laptop and booted into gparted live and it wasn't recognized there either. (The XPS had another nvme x4 SSD prior) I'll return the drive. Question is do I replace it with the same model? I think I will since most reports are that this model worked fine in other laptops.