The LG Gram Book is more basic than you think but that’s not a problem

Marketing departments just can’t help themselves. In much the same way that Samsung now plasters the Galaxy name on any old gadgets, so LG just couldn’t resist using the Gram name on a laptop that really doesn’t deserve it.

Don’t get me wrong, for the money the LG Gram Book is a perfectly decent laptop, but at 1.65kg it’s not particularly lightweight and, historically, LG has reserved the “Gram” branding for its ultra-lightweight machines, such as the SuperSlim 15.6.

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Once you’ve moved past the fact that the LG Gram Book has been poorly named,  what we have here is a solid, basic 15in laptop designed for general home and office use.

Given the asking price, it suffers from the expected failings of the vast majority of cheap laptops, like a drab display, a low-rent webcam and a keyboard without a backlight.

It does have some strengths, though, such as good looks and equally good build quality, a decent level of performance, tuneful speakers and the capacity to accept more memory and storage post-purchase.

An exciting laptop the LG Gram Book is not, then, but it is a competent one and for only a few quid more than a monkey, that’s all you have any reason to expect.

Price and competition

There’s only one model of the LG Gram Book to be had, and it’s generally available for around £530. LG’s web store lists the RRP at £699, but it’s been on offer for either £529 or £599 while I’ve been writing this review. That’s not bad for a 15in laptop.

Providing you can live with a smaller screen, though, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x is a viable alternative. Performance is good, battery life is strong, and there are lots of options to choose from when you order directly from Lenovo. The keyboard is a little bouncy, though, and the speakers aren’t as good as the new LG’s.

Samsung’s Galaxy Book 4 is, like the LG, hampered by a name it fails to live up to, and though recently replaced by the Galaxy Book 5, is still available and for a lot less money than when launched. For just £549, it’s good value, made of metal rather than plastic, and you can add a second SSD.

HP’s 14in Pavilion SE has been knocking about for a few years now and is still a good choice for anyone wanting a cheap notebook. Available with either Core i3, i5 or i7 silicon, the i5 model uses the same CPU as the LG and costs a mere £409. It’s smaller than the LG and lacks the upgrade options, but it’s still a fine, affordable Windows laptop.

Design and features

For a budget notebook made from plastic, the Gram Book is a well-made and handsome affair. There’s a wee bit of flex in the lid, but nothing untoward for something holding an unlaminated plastic screen, while the base is impressively creak-free.

At a shade over 1.5kg, it’s on the lighter side for a 15.6in laptop, but I still wouldn’t call it “Gram”-light. The external dimensions of 360 x 238 x 19.4mm are entirely par for the course.

There’s only one colourway, which LG calls Titan Silver but I call grey. Name aside, the finish does a good job of not showing greasy fingerprints. 

And the Gram Book doesn’t do too badly, either, when it comes to I/O ports with two USB-C, two USB-A, HDMI 1.4 and a 3.5mm audio jack scattered around the edges of the machine.

Both the USB-C and one of the USB-A ports are 5Gbits/sec USB 3.2 Gen 1 spec, while the second USB-A is only 480Mbps USB 2.0 spec. Both USB-C ports can output a DP AltMode video feed, and either can be used to connect the supplied 65W charger.

Given the price, you wouldn’t expect cutting-edge wireless comms, and so it proves with the Intel AX203 modem only capable of supporting 2.4/5GHz Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2.

Unusually for a cheap laptop, however, there’s space for a second 2280 SSD and a memory expansion via a second SODIMM slot. Adding extra RAM won’t revolutionise the LG’s performance, but given you can buy a 16GB stick for around £30, it’s a cheap upgrade.

Given that LG clearly intends users to delve inside the Gram Book, though, I found it a little surprising that four of the screws securing the base plate in place were hidden under a rubber strip. This is easily removed – and sticky enough to be replaced afterwards – but I almost damaged the rather flimsy base panel before realising there were more screws to undo.

Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

When a manufacturer can’t find anything to say about a keyboard other than it has a “retro-red” power button, you know it’s pretty thin gruel you’re dealing with.

To start with the positives, the deck is surprisingly solid for a budget laptop, and the layout is entirely conventional. There’s also a handy numeric keyboard made of ⅔-width keys situated off to the right-hand side.

In the glass-half-empty side of the equation, the action of the keys is both shallow and rather loose, which doesn’t make for an overly enjoyable typing experience, and there’s no backlight. The keycap graphics are transfers rather than being painted on, which could wear away with heavy use.

The touchpad is a little on the diminutive side at 115 x 75mm, but otherwise works well. The surface is perfectly smooth and pleasant to the touch, while the click-action is both positive and quiet.

The webcam is terrible: a drab 720p affair with none of Windows’ fancy Studio special effects. And it doesn’t support Windows Hello facial recognition, which, in the absence of a fingerprint reader, means there’s no biometric security whatsoever. At least there’s a privacy shutter over the lens.

Display and audio quality

The 15.6in, 60Hz 1,920 x 1,080 IPS display is typical budget laptop fare. Peak brightness is an adequate-for-indoor-use 300cd/m², but the panel only covers 55% of the sRGB colour space.

Thanks to a rather high level of black luminescence, the contrast ratio is a low 880:1, so what colour there is doesn’t exactly pop. With such a narrow gamut, the colour accuracy isn’t great, either.

On a more positive note, the matte finish on the screen does a good job keeping reflections at bay, and there’s no issue with chromatic shift at extreme viewing angles.

The sound system in £500 laptops usually needs to be judged in degrees of ear-bleeding awfulness, but the 1.5W speakers buried inside the Gram Book do a surprisingly good job provided you are listening in a quiet environment.

Volume isn’t great either, with the reading on my sound meter barely reaching 70dBA while playing a pink noise source and monitoring it at a 1m distance, but there’s a more-than-adequate amount of bass, and the overall sound is warm, detailed and very well balanced. 

Performance and battery life

The LG’s performance was never going to be anything beyond mediocre, given that it’s built around an ultra-low-power 13th-generation Intel Core i5-1334U CPU with Intel’s integrated Graphics.

For reference, the 1334U is a ten-core Raptor Lake CPU released early in 2023 with just two performance cores and a maximum clock of 4.6GHz from the fast cores and 3.4GHz from the other eight.

LG’s specification sheet actually lists the iGPU as Iris Xe, but given that my review machine was running on a single-channel stick of 16GB DDR4 RAM, it showed up in Windows as Intel UHD and performed accordingly. Iris Xe requires dual-channel memory, so you’ll need to add a second stick of RAM to get the slightly better Xe-level of performance.

Another thing to mention about the chipset is that it doesn’t support many of Windows’ latest local AI tools. Some, like webcam Studio Effects and Recall, don’t work at all, and you’ll find a lot of the generative AI features in Paint are also missing.

In our in-house 4K multi-media benchmark, the Gram Book scored 176 points, which means it’s more than capable of running basic programmes like a web browser, spreadsheet, word processor or email client simultaneously and quickly. 

By strange coincidence, that’s the same score produced by a 2020 M1 MacBook Air and not a million miles shy of the 2022 M2 model, neither of which we slated for lacking performance.

For a more recent comparison, the Gram Book feels much like a laptop running on one of the lower-end 8-core Snapdragon Plus CPUs like the Qualcomm Snapdragon X X1-26-100-powered Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x Gen 10.

Graphics performance is, unsurprisingly, rather poor so you won’t be running any demanding games or 3D modelling software. I didn’t expect the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling test to run, but it did, albeit at a glacial 10.8fps.

I’ve previously had cause to criticise some of LG’s Gram laptops for thermal issues, but the Gram Book behaved impeccably. Under heavy stress, both the CPU and GPU happily ran at near-100% for prolonged periods while the single fan never rose above a gentle whisper.

Storage performance is impressive, too. UFS or PCIe 3 storage is often all you get at this price point, but LG is supplying a fast PCIe 4 512GB Phison SSD. It turned in some impressive speeds for a budget laptop, with sequential read and write speeds of 4,315MB/sec and 4,251MB/sec, respectively.

As far as battery life is concerned, however, it’s a familiar story. A combination of a small 51Wh battery and an Intel CPU from early 2023 was never going to deliver levels of stamina to match the latest Windows Core Ultra 2 and Snapdragon laptops, but the Gram Book’s 6hrs 18mins runtime was still surprisingly bad.  

LG Gram Book: Verdict

LG’s website lists the Gram Book as having a regular RRP of £699. At that price, it’s a pretty solid recommendation if all you want is a basic laptop, but given that even LG is, at the time of writing, offering it at a £100 discount, and pretty much every other retailer is selling it for around £530, you really can’t go far wrong.

All the faults with the Gram Book are those common with any £500 laptop, be it a Windows or ChromeOS machine, namely a drab display, two-bob webcam and unimpressive battery life. The LG, however, counters with a surprisingly good sound system, better than average build quality and the facility to add more storage and memory. It isn’t the most exciting thing on the planet but it is a solid pick.

LG Gram Book specifications