Review: LG Gram Pro 17

Choosing a laptop inevitably involves a matter of compromise. A lightweight, more portable device means a small screen and a cramped keyboard. A larger laptop provides room to stretch out and usually more power—at the expense of portability. What’s an on-the-go creative to do? Is there a best of both worlds out there somewhere?

Enter LG with its Gram Pro 17, and I wouldn’t dream of burying the lede on this one: At 18 millimeters thick and weighing just 2.8 pounds, it is the thinnest and lightest 17-inch laptop I’ve ever seen, and it’s not even close.

Some points of comparison to start, in case you think I’m being dramatic. The 17.3-inch Acer Nitro 17 I reviewed recently weighs a hefty 6.3 pounds and is 34 mm thick. Back in 2018, HP’s Omen X 17 tipped the scales at 9.9 pounds and a beastly 41 mm of girth—and it didn’t even have the courtesy to include an optical drive with it. The only machine that is even in the ballpark is the oddball HP Spectre Foldable. With its removable keyboard, it weighs 3.5 pounds and is 23 mm thick—though that’s hardly an apples-to-apples comparison.

That’s kind of the point. There is no comparison for this laptop and no meaningful point of reference. Unboxing it felt like someone was pulling a prank on me. Did a child’s plastic toy somehow get shipped to me instead of a Windows laptop? Where’s the usual 1-pound power brick? LG has been making iterative versions of this laptop since 2019, but even the older models don’t reach the featherweight status of this 2024 model.

Aside from being impossibly light and thin, what do you get with the new Gram Pro 17? An Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU is backed by 32 GB of RAM, a 2-terabyte solid-state drive (curiously configured as two logical disks), and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card. That’s a fairly dated, lower-end graphics processor, which I’ll delve into in more detail soon. The bright IPS screen offers 2,460 X 1,600 pixels of resolution, but it isn't a touchscreen (to keep things thin).

The port selection, arranged on both sides of the device with none on the back, is good but not quite great. You get two USB-A ports, two USB-C 4.0 ports, and a full-size HDMI. You’ll need one of the USB-C ports for charging with the included A/C adapter.

LG's design here is understated, all matte-black, powder-coated with gentle curves at the corners and nothing in the way of flourishes outside of the “Gram” logo on top. There’s room for a (rather slim) numeric keypad to the right of the spacious keyboard, though key travel is necessarily restricted due to the extreme thinness of the device.

There comes a time in every laptop review when you have to start using the thing, and with a unit like this comes expectations that compromises must have been involved to get the device so light and thin. It’s my unfortunate duty to report that that is indeed the case here—to some extent—though whether the unit’s flaws are outright deal-breakers will ultimately be a personal decision.

Let’s start with performance. It’s good, not great, notably because the lower-end graphics card doesn’t do a ton to elevate graphics and gaming performance over what an integrated graphics chip can do. While I saw a modest improvement in performance over recently reviewed Core Ultra laptops on some benchmarks, on many tests I didn’t measure any benefit at all. Even on the laptop’s most successful graphics tests, the improvement in score over an average laptop with integrated graphics was rarely more than 20 or 30 percent. That may sound significant, but we’re still talking about fairly basic, entry-level performance on graphics tests.

On general business tasks, the unit’s performance was at or below average. In fact, on the standard PCMark 10 benchmark, the Gram Pro got one of the lowest marks I’ve achieved in the Core Ultra era to date. A small number of my benchmark tests also failed multiple times during testing, which isn’t a major alarm trigger but merits additional consideration; there’s no telling what tricks LG had to pull off to wedge all of this into 2.8 pounds. Battery life, at just 6 hours and 31 minutes of full-screen YouTube playback, is rather low but, again, not unexpected.

The other major problem is a particularly hot topic, pun intended: The LG Gram Pro 17 can run hot. Very, very hot. I once complained in a review that a Microsoft Surface hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit. That seems quaint next to the scalding 121 degrees I measured on the LG Gram Pro 17, both underneath and in the strip above the keyboard. That is hot enough to cause first-degree burns, and according to my thighs and fingertips, it is hot enough to be scary as hell.

It’s worth noting that the Gram Pro includes a not-really-documented feature that lets you adjust its “performance mode” by tapping the F7 key. Four operating modes are available, from Low Noise Mode, which silences the loud but clearly necessary fan, to Max Mode, which unleashes the hounds. The impact on performance can be significant.

While Max Mode will get you only a 3 to 5 percent boost on general apps over Normal Mode, I was able to triple frame rates on graphics tests by kicking it into high gear. (Max Mode benchmark scores are reported throughout this review.) The difference is also palpable to the ears: The fan hit a loud 51 decibels on Max Mode but didn’t run at all on the lower two operating modes.

Finally, there’s the issue of price. At $2,300 as configured, the LG Gram Pro 17 is far from cheap. If the unit had the performance chops to back that up, it might have been able to merit the outlay, but as it stands, the user experience is rather pedestrian—and sometimes erratic. With its tendency to run extremely—unprecedently—hot, I have to wonder if this laptop might lack longevity as well. The flame that burns twice as bright … well, you know the rest.