When most people try to find the best rugged laptops or the best laptops, they mostly disregard thin and light ultrabooks. But the LG Gram 17 we are going to talk about today is, in fact, Mil std 810g durability standard rated. And it doesn’t have any of the bulk that even big modern rugged laptops usually come with.
Why We Like It – LG Gram 17
The LG Gram 17 is some of, if not the best, thin and light ultrabook available out there that’s durably made. Not only is the LG Gram 17 is shockingly thin even for a 17-inch ultrabook, but it’s also extremely lightweight. And, it still manages to provide excellent performance, battery life, included with incredible cooling.
- Up to 20 hours of battery life
- Excellent IPS display (2560 x 1600p)
- Extremely thin and light
- Slow SATA based SSD
Power & Performance
The LG Gram 17 comes with an incredibly efficient quad-core Intel Core i7-8565U processor and uses the integrated Iris Plus Graphics for providing display output. The TDP of the whole board is just 15 W, and it really doesn’t draw any more power than that even under load. And, the cooling system is excellent on top of that, and the processor, more often than not, stays at its max boost clock of 4.60 GHz when required.
Related: If you like this laptop, you might be interested in our LG Gram 15 review.
Battery
This is the part where this LG Gram hits a home run in. We already said how efficient the eighth-gen Intel Core i7 processor and the integrated Intel Iris Plus Graphics are. Even the newer 10th Gen Ice Lake mobile processors aren’t vastly more efficient, even though they are made on the more recent 10nm node. Even with the high-resolution large screen, you do get a super long battery life of up to 20 hours. That’s an extremely impressive feat for a 72WHr battery to pull off.
Related: Also check out our LG Gram Laptop review.
Ports & Expandability
Unlike the MacBook Pro or something like the Dell XPS 17, even though this laptop is super slim, it doesn’t force you to embrace the dongle life. It comes with a MicroSD card slot, an HDMI, two USB 3.1 full-sized Type-A ports, a USB C port (that supports Thunderbolt 3), and a headphone/mic combo jack.
The expandability options are also extremely good on this ultrabook. You get two PCI-E slots (one x4 slot and an x2 slot for SATA/NVME drives), and there’s a SODIMM memory slot too.
Build Quality
As we already mentioned before, even though it’s a slim and light laptop, it’s built extremely well. The narrow bezels of the big screen give the laptop a modern look, and both the keyboard & trackpad are excellent. And the CPU performance is excellent too, due to ample cooling. In some ways, it’s actually even lighter and sturdier than the much more expensive Panasonic Toughbook Windows tablet.
Value
At below $1500, the LG Gram 17 is exceptionally well priced and should be very enticing for a lot of users. The newer variant of this laptop is already out, and one of the only improvements it has compared to the previous model is its bigger and faster NVME storage drive. If you can’t suffice with the performance of integrated Intel Iris Plus Graphics, then, needless to say, you have to spend more money on the Lenovo ThinkPad P52 workstation.
LG Gram 17 Wrap Up
Overall the 2019 LG Gram 17 is one of the best laptops you can buy at its price bracket, period. But if you don’t have $1300 to spend on a laptop, the Dell Latitude 5414 Rugged Notebook is also a good option to consider.
