LG Updates Ultralight Gram Laptops & Convertible: Ice Lake Inside
by Anton Shilov on December 13, 2019 6:00 PM EST
Along with their flagship 17-inch model, LG this week has also given its 14 and 15.6-inch LG gram laptops an Ice Lake upgrade. The updated machines pair Intel’s Ice Lake processors with up to 24 GB of RAM, all contained within the gram's minimalist, ultra-thin carbon magnesium alloy body, with a total weight of around 1 kilogram. The new LG gram notebooks and convertible will be available next year.
The 2020 LG gram mobile PCs are powered by Intel’s 10th Generation Core processor (Ice Lake) with up to Iris Plus Graphics. The CPU is cooled down using LG’s Mega Cooling System, though the only thing that the company says about it is that it runs cool and quiet ‘under all usage scenarios’. The updated notebooks can be equipped with up to 24 GB of DDR4-2666 memory, whereas the convertible only supports up to 16 GB of RAM. Meanwhile, all the machines feature two M.2 slots for a couple of NVMe SSDs to provide both speed and capacity.
Being premium consumer laptops, LG’s next year gram systems come equipped with a robust set of I/O capabilities, which includes Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth, Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.1, HDMI, microSD/UFS slot, and a 3.5-mm audio jack for headsets. As far as multimedia features are concerned, the notebooks have a webcam, DTX X Ultra-badged speakers, and a microphone array. Finally, they also have a fingerprint reader.
One of the key selling points of LG’s gram mobile PCs is their long battery life. The new 14-inch machines will use a 72 Wh battery, whereas the 15.6-inche will come with an even larger 80 Wh battery. The maker says that the convertible LG gram 2-in-1 machine will work for over 20 hours on one charge, and the 15.6-inch model should be able to last for even longer.
| The LG Gram 2020 Brief Specifications | ||||
| LG Gram 2-in-1 14T90N |
LG Gram 14 14Z90N |
LG Gram 15 15Z90N |
||
| Size | 14-inch IPS | 15.6-inch IPS | ||
| Screen Resolution | 1920×1080 | |||
| Touch Support | LG's IPS In-Cell Touch technology | - | - | |
| Color Gamut | ? | over 96% sRGB | ||
| Protection | Corning Gorilla Glass 6 | - | - | |
| CPU | Family | 10th generation Intel Core processors (Ice Lake) | ||
| Model | various | |||
| Graphics | Intel UHD Graphics | Intel UHD Graphics or Intel Iris Plus Graphics | ||
| RAM | up to 16 GB DDR4-2666 onboard + SO-DIMM |
up to 24 GB DDR4-2666 onboard + SO-DIMM |
||
| Storage | up to two M.2 NVMe SSDs | |||
| Wi-Fi + BT | Wi-Fi 6 + Bluetooth | |||
| USB | 2 × USB 3.1 Type-A 1 × USB 3.1 Gen 2 via TB3 |
3 × USB 3.1 Type-A 1 × USB 3.1 Gen 2 via TB3 |
||
| Thunderbolt 3 | 1 × Thunderbolt 3 | |||
| Fingerprint Sensor | Yes | |||
| Audio | Microphone array, DTS X Ultra stereo speakers, TRRS jack | |||
| Other I/O | MicroSD card reader, webcam, etc. | |||
| Battery | 72 Wh | 80 Wh | ||
| Battery Life | over 20 hours | many hours | many hours | |
| Dimensions | Width | 324.6 mm | 12.78 inch | 323.4 mm | 12.73 inch | 357.6 mm | 14.08 inch |
| Depth | 210.8 mm | 8.3 inch | 209.8 mm | 8.26 inch | 225.3 mm | 8.87 inch | |
| Thickness | 17.9 mm | 0.7 inch | 16.8 mm | 0.66 inch | 16.8 mm | 0.66 inch | |
| Weight | 1145 grams | 2.52 lbs | 999 grams | 2.2 lbs | 1120 grams | 2.47 lbs | |
LG will demonstrate its new portables at CES 2020 in early January. Expect the company to disclose more information about pricing and availability timeframes there as well.
Related Reading:
- LG’s Lightweight Gram 17-Inch Laptop Gets Intel’s Ice Lake CPU
- LG Releases Gram 17 Laptop: An Ultra-Thin Notebook with a 17.3-Inch Display
- LG Gram 2018 Laptops Unveiled: Quad-Core i5/i7, TB3, ~2.2 Lbs, 22 Hrs
- Razer Unveils New Blade Stealth 13: Quad-Core Whiskey Lake, dGPU, 4K UHD
- ASUS Unveils Ultra-Thin ZenBook Pro 15 with Six-Core Core i9, GTX 1050, Calibrated 4K LCD
Source: LG
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ikjadoon - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Is this RAM spec correct? Ice Lake supports DDR4-3200 & LPDDR4X-3733. Why would a battery-life focused laptop not use LPDDR4X, but also use a slower speed DDR4?"Many hours" battery life 😂
And let this be a damn testament: bigger batteries don't mean a lot of weight (it's around 3-4 g / WHr), and it's not just LG, but even the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1.
//
The RAM spec is *probably* wrong; HP put out their Spectre x360 Ice Lake RAM as LPDDR4-3200 when in fact it is actually LPDDR4X-3733.
erinadreno - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Gram has 8 or 4G soldered on ram and an empty slot. There’s no lpddr4 sodimm anytime soon. And they had to use ddr4 in this case. As for 2666mhz speed, it could be better but very few sodimms are capable of.Ryan Smith - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - link
"Is this RAM spec correct?"It's as correct as LG lists it. Their official specs say DDR4, not LPDDR4X. Though I agree the latter is more likely, until they say otherwise, DDR4 it is.
danielfranklin - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - link
It has to be since they are providing a SO-DIMM slot.WIll be interesting to see how the changes the performance of the platform, there are a lot of indications that a lot of the performance in the GPU dept comes from the extra bandwidth.
Given they dropped the eDRAM this time the DDR4X it so important!
sharath.naik - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - link
There is no eDRAM that makes GPU performance in Grams worse than any other icelake laptop. for a dual-channel memory to use its bandwidth well it needs to be of the same size. having 8 GB soldered on and adding 16GB SODIMM will likely reduce it to single-channel speeds. IGPU is all about RAM bandwidth. I also think the RAM spec is wrong, I have known people using 32GB SODIMM modules in these so that should make these support a maximum of 36GB-40GB ram.danielfranklin - Sunday, December 15, 2019 - link
I havent seen a laptop in years not at least report dual channel with mix RAM sizes, havent done extensive benchmarking though.I cant see why the small amount of virtual GPU RAM couldnt be etched out of equal sizes on each channel and ive assumed it was in recent years.
Not entirely sure how Windows deals with it, but for the most part thee average desktop tasks are hugley bandwidth restricted and we would be talking about 1-2% in most tasks, compression aside.
As i said, ive been mixed machines report dual channel for years and i assumed things were mapped in a dual channel way up until a certain point. The video RAM would surely be simple to do though.
0x1874DE4C - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
So I STILL have to choose between "only" 16gb in dual-channel mode, or more in single-channel mode.That's why I didn't buy the 2019 Gram 17, and held on for an Ice Lake refresh. Looks like I wasted my time.
There's a massive amount of space inside them, and plenty of room for two sockets. No excuse.
sharath.naik - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Do note for productivity this is not an issue the performance hit is not that significant. There are hardly any think and light out there that can support an upgrade to 40GB ram. Not to mention dual M2 slots. The only noticeable impact will be on iGPU. Apart from that and the price, these LG grams are the best of all worlds, weight/battery size/screen. I especially love the 17-inch model, it is the perfect screen size and resolution combination out there. If not for my thinkpad P52 that is the laptop to have for productivity.Aviraj_21 - Saturday, January 4, 2020 - link
aaaRetycint - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - link
Interesting how they managed to fit a 2-in-1 and a 72Wh battery in a 1.15kg package. Probably sacrificed chassis rigidity for weight, which isn't a bad thing imo.