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May 27, 2023

LG Gram SuperSlim Review

LG's Gram laptops, at all their screen sizes, have always prized lightness. After all, you can’t name a PC after a minute measure of weight, then deliver a hefty hulk. With the new Gram SuperSlim

LG's Gram laptops, at all their screen sizes, have always prized lightness. After all, you can’t name a PC after a minute measure of weight, then deliver a hefty hulk. With the new Gram SuperSlim (starts at $1,699.99; $1,999.99 as tested), LG adds remarkable thinness to the equation. This 15.6-inch laptop is virtually as thin as (0.49 inch), and more than a pound lighter than (2.18 pounds), the 15.3-inch Apple MacBook Air. The SuperSlim is so thin and so light that it feels uncanny, but its extreme portability isn't the only attraction. It also delivers exceptional battery life, and its screen uses dazzling OLED technology. However, the panel has an old-school 16:9 aspect ratio and is limited to full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution, which suffices for the size but falls far short of competing 15.6- and 16-inch models at this price point. Even with its dazzling dimensions and display, the LG Gram SuperSlim feels overpriced.

This laptop lives up to its name—it's absurdly slim. When I first picked it up, it felt like a movie prop or an empty shell of a laptop. It's the thinnest and lightest 15-inch notebook I've ever seen, lighter than most 13-inch ultraportables and only 0.43 inch thick at its front edge.

A set of calipers will tell you that the big MacBook Air is a twentieth of an inch thinner, but at 3.3 pounds it's relatively portly. The Dell XPS 15, which we consider to be a svelte desktop replacement, weighs 4.2 pounds—a full two pounds heavier than the SuperSlim!

LG achieves such incredible lightness by using a magnesium-alloy chassis instead of an aluminum one. The tradeoff is that magnesium is less rigid than aluminum; you'll feel some flex in the paper-thin lid and also beneath your fingertips on the keyboard deck. The Gram definitely feels more durable than a cheap plastic laptop, but not as solid as your average aluminum one. That said, the company boasts that the SuperSlim has passed seven MIL-STD 810H tests against road hazards like shock, vibration, dust, and temperature extremes.

Another sacrifice the SuperSlim makes is keyboard comfort. It shouldn't come as a surprise when I tell you the keys have extremely shallow travel, giving a typing feel reminiscent of the much-maligned "butterfly" keyboard of the former MacBook Air. There's simply no room for a keyboard with deeper travel and a more luxurious feel. The keys aren't wobbly or mushy, but I wish their response offered snappier feedback. The keyboard does offer two-level backlighting, which is appreciated when you're typing in a dark room or aboard a red-eye flight.

Measuring 0.49 by 14 by 9 inches, the SuperSlim is wide enough to accommodate a numeric keypad beside the keyboard. The Backspace and Tab keys are shortened a bit to make room for the number pad, but the rest of the keys are full-size except for half-height cursor arrow keys. A slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratio screen would give more space below the keyboard for a larger touchpad, so the SuperSlim's looks and feels undersized. It feels smooth and accurate, however, with a firm, but not too firm, click action.

As mentioned, the other headliner for the LG Gram SuperSlim is its non-touch OLED screen, which delivers exceptional contrast with inky blacks, bright white backgrounds, and rich, vivid colors. It covers 100% of the DCI-P3 palette, and it's very bright, measured at an impressive 415 nits in our testing.

As pleased as we are with the OLED panel's performance, we're less enthused by its retro resolution. The 15.6-inch screen's 1080p resolution can't compete with the sharper screens of the 15.3-inch MacBook Air (2,880 by 1,864 pixels) and the Dell XPS 15 (3,456 by 2,160 pixels). Text looks blurry and pixelated around the edges. You should expect higher resolution from a $1,500 laptop, let alone a $2,000 one.

In addition, the classic 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio remains ideal for watching movies, but taller 16:10 and squarer 3:2 ratios are rapidly taking over for productivity and much creative work, showing more text in documents or more content in webpages without scrolling. Games are still tailored to 16:9 screens, but the SuperSlim relies on Intel's integrated graphics and won't be of interest to gamers.

The LG has a pair of 2-watt speakers that produce thin, tinny sound. Many desktop replacement laptops find room for quad speakers for fuller audio and more bass, but you're stuck with weak sound unless you plug headphones into the SuperSlim.

Like the display, the webcam offers 1080p resolution, and while its picture is superior to that of generic 720p cameras, it's one of the less impressive 1080p webcams I've seen. Images were grainy, with inaccurate colors that produced overly red skin tones. The webcam does offer IR face recognition for Windows Hello, letting you log in without having to type a password or PIN.

Alas, the Gram SuperSlim is too thin to house an HDMI or USB Type-A port, offering only three USB-C ports and an audio jack. The two USB-C ports on the left flank support Thunderbolt 4 while the one on the right follows the USB4 spec. Any of the three can be used with the provided AC adapter, and LG throws a USB-C-to-Ethernet dongle into the box for wired-network users.

LG sells two models of the Gram SuperSlim. The base unit costs $1,699.99 and features an Intel Core i7-1360P processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB solid-state drive. For $300 more, our test unit doubles the memory to 32GB and quadruples the storage to 2TB. Both models rely on the same CPU, Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, Windows 11 Home, and the 1,920-by-1,080 OLED display.

For our benchmark charts, we pitted the SuperSlim against similar systems, including the sleek Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360, a 16-inch convertible with the same Core i7-1360P chip, and the Acer Swift Go 16, which has a higher-performance Core i7-13700H processor. Our favorite ultraportable, the 14-inch Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11, uses a battery-thrifty Core i7-1355U CPU, while the HP Dragonfly Pro features a custom-to-the-model AMD Ryzen 7 7736U. All five of these laptops use integrated graphics rather than the discrete GPU of a gaming rig.

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's boot drive.

Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

All five systems delivered excellent everyday productivity in PCMark 10, with the AMD-powered Dragonfly Pro leading the way, followed by the Acer and its Intel H-series CPU. The SuperSlim underwhelmed us somewhat, landing near the back of the pack in Cinebench and HandBrake (it had a conflict and was unable to complete our Geekbench test), though it had a stronger showing in Photoshop, thanks in part to its abundance of RAM versus the rest of the pack. Still, mostly because of its relatively low-res display, we're not high on the LG as a content creation machine.

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, the more modest Night Raid (suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and tougher Time Spy (suitable for gaming notebooks with discrete GPUs).

We also run two OpenGL tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Move along, nothing to see here: These productivity-oriented laptops' integrated graphics are what you'd expect for gaming. (In fact, the LG balked at one of our two GFXBench tests.) They're fine for Solitaire and video streaming, but you can forget about fast-twitch games or workstation-class visual rendering. That's not what machines like these are about.

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The SuperSlim’s OLED display, like the Samsung's AMOLED, delivered excellent results on our display tests. It covered 100% of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts and a strong 94% of the Adobe RGB gamut, and it took the silver medal in our battery rundown, lasting over 15 hours to show unplugged stamina more befitting of an ultraportable than a desktop replacement.

The LG Gram SuperSlim is certainly not without its charms, from its phenomenally thin and light chassis to its attractive OLED display and outstanding battery life. Unless you need the absolutely thinnest and lightest 15-inch laptop, however, you'll find better values among competing models like Apple's 15-inch MacBook Air or Dell's XPS 15. The latter costs more but nets you a 4K OLED screen and Nvidia RTX graphics, two items crucial for content creation where the LG's integrated graphics and relatively low-res display let it down. Without a use case for content creators or gamers, the SuperSlim is a tough sell at two grand, unless you want to combine big-screen portability with bragging rights for the thinnest laptop in the conference room or coffee shop.

LG's 15.6-inch Gram SuperSlim is exceptionally thin and light for a big-screen laptop, and its battery is a champ, but such slimness has its price.

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