extremecarver

I've received my Gram 16 Pro 2025 with Lunar Lake 256v today from Amazon Warehouse in Like new condition. As far as I can tell it was never used before - but package shortly opened and then directly returned. 1104€ made it worth it. I had to be below 1200€ inckluding VAT for writing it off on my business. The CPU power limits can be set in the bios, but it's not respected. However they can be successfully modified with Throttlestop - so setting 35/45 for example isn't a problem. However the cooling for me doesn't manage more than 35w continously without throttling. I haven't found out how to change Prochot offset to 0 from the default 8° (in order to increase CPU temp limit to 100° instead of 92° which LG set - this should be possible via advanced bios somehow. Battery size is fully charged is 79630Wh - so 103.4% of indicated. That is very nice as LG isn't good at all in this regard and ofen battery in new gram have less fully charged capacity vs design capacity. It had 0 cycles so clearly is brand new. I think I will need to repaste the CPU with Arctic MX-5 or MX-6 as I am about 5% lower in benchmarks even with PL1/PL2 limits removed vs say notebookcheck on Cinebench R23 Multi. It still has the old cooler. Only the RTX 5050 Gram Pro 2025 already has the vastly improved new coolers (lighter and 25% stronger at same power use). I guess If I find out how to remove the Prochot offset of 8° and repaste the CPU around 45w constant power draw should be possible instead of the 35-36w right now (each measure helping 5w or so I estimate) Yeah the pro has a stiffer bottom part vs the old LG Gram. The display however is still just as flimsy - the new 2026 Aerominium are much better in this regard. And even though the production date The speakers are much much better vs my old LG gram, or well say louder. My old Gram the display clearly lost brightness - at around 30% on the new it equals 100% on my old. That is something which will always happen as displays age - the get less bright - so after nearly 5 years of using my old Gram it has done it's job. I think also the speakers got less loud over time - also something usually happening. For the form factor - I would have prefered the old - the slimmer design for me isn't a good trade for 1cm deeper size. But yes I understand only because it's slimmer it's much more stable vs the non Pro lg Gram. The reason it's more stable is the battery helping tremendously in stability vs the non Pro grams. Out of the box however quite a few things weren't working well. It wouldn't enter C3 or lower states on the CPU - dunno what advanced bios setting I changed but now it goes nicely into C10 and CPU package power goes down to 0.6w on idle instead of 1.2w before. Also note that HIPM DIPM isn't activated out of the box - wasting a lot of power. So you need to add that registry entry to show up in the power plan and put the NVME into lowest. Otherwise you burn at least 0.5w additionally. Yes I would have prefered the 5050 RTX version - but that would have been at least 70% more expensive. The same likely will go for the really far superior new 2026 LG gram with Panther lake. They have a new OLED that is better vs the older OLED displays, another 15% better battery life, 50-60% more CPU power, 100% more GPU power but will be much more expensive. I really would like the new Aerominium case. While I can see in Korea you can get a keyboard for the 2026 already - which will mean turning the lower body into Aerominum - for the screen this will be very expensive. Also the bottom is still plain magnesium I think - it's only the Display case and the upper part (the one with the keyboard) that is now Aerominium. If I had the money for the 5050 version I would wait for the 2026 Panther lake which except if your a gamer is the far superior notebook overall. I haven't yet migrated my old 2TB disk into this one - that should help battery life a bit too - as the 980 Pro is pretty power hungry. I'll actually try hot swapping in my old drive. Let's see how that goes. My old 2021 Gram was at it's limit on 4K UHD playback with UHD monitor connected - no worries here now of course. Often the main thing slowing out an older laptop are video codecs that have no hardware decoding. Well Lunar Lake has H266 hardware decoding - but it will not have AV2. Likely that won't make it before 2027 into any laptop. That's kinda the biggest drawback in a couple of years if you get a Lunar lake based notebook. Placement of the primary NVME drive below the CPU: Do not use this placement for your primary drive - but only for data grab. Being so close to the CPU it gets too hot. This is actually a little bit (5mm or so) better then 5050 mainboard. It is much better on the standard LG gram. Otherwise you may quite likely fry your NVME. I'm not sure if it's possible to install some sort of barrier there by putting a small rubber insulator there. I really wonder that no one so far noticed this. But it's pretty apparent when running a continours benchmark and then looking at the NVME temperature. It hit's 60 without any actual load if the CPU plugs along at 92°... Edit: so it worked to just plug in my old harddrive. Steps to do: 1. you need a USB mouse. 2. Change boot order and move old disk to spot 1 in bios, best remove fingerpring login and any other login before moving the drive - else you will need to cut power three times while booting to get into boot option, boot in safe mode with networking - change a registry setting, reboot, use the physical mouse to click on other sign in option and select password... Then install the new LG updater for the current model (the old program is useless now) - install all updates. 5. Make sure under settings --> apps --> optional features --> to install windows hello facial --> reboot plently of times and run windows update --> after 3 hours everything was working without fresh windows installation. Power options were messed up again - so need to set in registry all the options especially AHCI link and again select lowest - as otherwise it defaults once again to HIPM only. Last step - get a new windows license used and activate windows. Somehow you will need to login back to many places - and still reactivate the 2nd factor authentication from fingerprint now to facial. For me that still saves plenty of hours vs a fresh installation of windows 11 madness.

Well I guess identical to your 5050. On the 5050 model the 5050 can push 40w continuously I think according to reviews. That way the CPU can still add over 25w. According to that review the fans were first used already on the 5050 version - but not the Aerominum case. It does make sense IMHO. On my old 2022 it throttles to around 27-28w on continuous load with single fan that is smaller. I think even with single heat pipe but two fans that push a bit more air 50-55w should actually be possible in thermal envelope. Lunar lake LG gram are not thermally throttled but because LG set very small tdp limits (well easy to see in throttlestop why it throttles). And yeah in summer over 30° that may be different vs the typical 21-22° of normal tests.

Comparison between last years Lunar Lake, and this year AMD and Intel X7 options. Summary Intel X7 is basically a little more CPU power than the old Ultra 9, graphics power about RTX 4050 so much better than anything old integrated. AMD is similar in single tread to Arrow lake, but loses out a little on multi threading. It still clearly wins over Lunar lake quite easily. She mentions that the Aerominium is indeed more stable and feels more premium. It's again very visible in the outside frame of the display if you have or have not Aerominium. Both the new panther lake and AMD have basically zero throttling still pushing 45w into 20 minutes mark. That is pretty impressive so the new fans do work much better. Battery life - now she's comparing an 1 year old Lunar lake model, so I would add a little to Lunar lake. And she compares with max screen brightness. Panther Lake with OLED comes out on top of AMD with the lunar lake last. Differences are rather subtle. AMD for price concious and office work, Intel for gaming and high performance... But yeah - I really guess only the X7 is this piece of marvel - other Panther lake without B390 graphics or less cores will rather feel like an optimized lunar lake - even better battery life but not much performance uplift, and actually worse graphics. I feel the x7 models of many laptops are gonna be sold out soon or as they appear - as word will spread about how much better it is vs older generations or the less able intel products. There must be a reason why LG and others are sending out the X7 models on masse but no other panther lake are widely distributed to reviewers. Also the weight is lower again - the new Aerominium gram pro 16s are at 1195g - so back below 1.2kg.

Yes the shape is identical, but the material surely not. And with only the pro switching to the new material the differentiation will be bigger. But yeah there won't be any no pro 16/17 while 14/15.6 inch likely won't be put much effort in. In 13/14 inch size LG has a lot of competition, in 16 less and in 17 no competition at all. I'm pretty sure most sales have always been 16/17. It's not only tapered edges, the pro is a bit slimmer overall, I guess this improves stability as there is very little empty space. It's exactly the empty space that makes the non pro grams so flexible. But yeah I found an offer for a lunar lake Pro at 1100 euros so let's see. I don't think we will see the 2026 panther lake below 1800 Euro anytime soon, and maybe not even in sales next year dropping below 1500.

yeah, but it still has no Mux, right? So battery runtime with the RTX5050 will be worse. I'm pretty sure it's possible to retrofit the 90wh battery to any pro model. Screws look identical. I wonder if the 77wh battery just has more reserve cells (and worse batches) for better longevity or is actually different. For the case I mean min 4:22 to 4:23 - that is quite different from the old models. At 5:11 it's very visble too.

I'm pretty sure it's testing once an oled version with X7! And an ultra7 IPS Version in comparison. In some places there is comparison with the old 255h with Nvidia 5050, the X7 seems to beat 4050 Nvidia but Cannot keep up with 5050.

Yeah we certainly will not get as much choice as Koreans. I guess they will put the best sellers from Korea on intl market if the processors are available. I guess X7 will be more about availability Vs want. I don't think 2025 with Aerominum exist, the feeling is very different. But you can easily tell on the edge of the screen. Is it aluminium there or magnesium? The new model has an aluminium strip there. But yeah it's likely possible to just upgrade any old pro and change to the new Aerominum by waiting till the case shows up as replacement. I think the pro has been stiffer Vs non pro. But it's again a pretty major increase in battery life, much more performance Vs any previous gram in case of the x7 (all others much less) and GPU performance for the X7 only that rivals the previous dedicated models... But yeah apart from the X7 model the changes are much smaller.

Seems Intel has really hit it out of the park with Panther lake X7 - it's like 20-70% faster than last years arrow lake, while neeeding less power than last years Lunar lake - or is the new OLED screen so efficient? The quoted battey life went up to 27 hours (Intel Oled X7 or AMD 2026 with inbuilt graphics ) vs last years 25.5 for the IPS or I think 18.5 hours for the Oled Arrow lake. The 2026 Ultra 5 IPS is even quoted at 29.5 hours of battery life but no price known yet. He quotes that the new case is 35% stiffer. Well any reviews say that the new case really feels premium unlike the plasticky feel of the old magnesium ones. Comparing it with the AMD numbers - Panther lake really seems like the much better choice. AMD seemingly is only slightly better than last year Lunar lake, but actually uses less power than Lunar lake so gets a little better battery life too. I do feel this one is the biggest update since 2021. Well last year Lunar lake/arrow lake was a big update over the rather unsuccesful 12-14.th gen Intel, but this time changes are even bigger if going for Intel. AMD likely 10-20% cheaper however - the basic Ultra 5 IPS pricing isn't announced yet - but the cheapest OLED Ultra 5 Intel vs cheapest AMD with IPS is 20% cheaper (or pay up 25%) But yeah so far I haven't really seen a test of the Ultra 5 anywhere - maybe it's rather Lunar lake performance - seing the architecture is quite similar. Seems like 16Z90U-KU7BK is the best deal right now... X7 with 32GB RAM, and not much more money than the cheapest Ultra 5. There will not be an X7 IPS model in 16". (and Ultra 7 over Ultra 5 won't be any advantage as usual). So if you want the highest performance by a good stretch with great battery life - it's OLED only.

Well you could set time for pl2 to unlimited...

I'll not write more about it as it's off topic, but the club of Rome B scenario of doubled resources got conventional oil sources right. Didn't get shale oil and tar sands but they are only short term fix... Copper and silver however we are actually right now approaching the limits of what is fiscally worthy to extract and the "green revolution" is bollocks as the copper and silver is too expensive so it won't happen. Also right now on oil we have an EROI of 12-13%, in 1970 it was 2%. And that's aggregate. New sources are worse while old are better. Once this reaches 30-40% it's game over and won't make sense anymore. We always extract easiest resources first, harder later or never. We are right now reaching the point where whatever replacement gets more difficult or needing more energy to extract arrives just as conventional oil is now on fixed decline. Actually oil extraction will still increase in 2026, maybe even 2027 but thats likely the final time. Prices are too low right now for significant further investment. And we haven't got any suitable replacement seing other resources also getting harder to get. We simply cannot afford expensive oil. World politics right now realises scarcity and US and China try to get resources into their realm, but that doesn't mean they realise what happens when we relatively run out of everything as energy to extract more gets more expensive right at the same time as those resources need significantly more energy to extract. Pollution getting worse, clean drinkable water less per capita. Quality sand running out, and so on... We have some good years left, maybe until 2030, but our financial system built on infinite growth may already collapse before as it needs growth to survive, that's why gold right now is rising and will continue to do so (except if we use it as silver replacement which doesn't make sense we would have way too much - the price is only justified by it's financial mean of money that doesn't inflate, unlike silver which gets used up more than extracted)... We can replace any single component with energy (also pollution), but doing so for everything that gets more rare is impossible. Also club of Rome back then in 1970 calculated an infinite resources scenario which didn't turn out better in the long run, collapse was simply later but therefore harder.. We are right on track with a 3x resources scenario and hitting more or less any marks the model back then predicted.

Can you not change the power limits in advanced bios anymore or with throttlestop?

It the AI bubble bursts everything is gonna burst. It's the last thing keeping our financial system from capsizing.. and it could coincide with many states or supra states like EU stopping to exist... I just had the 2025 - 13th gen 16 inch in my hands and open up and I really didn't feel much of a change at all... So far Lunar lake 16" are still very expensive while the basic 17" have come down quite a lot but still haven't seen one below 1199 Euro including Vat inside Europe... I wonder if we even get down to 1000 Euro this time on lunar lake models. Previous LG gram always went down to 700-800 Euro, sometimes 600 (like the 2025 - 13. Gen Intel model). It won't make sense for me to replace the battery a second time on my 2021 so I have about 6-7 months left to wait for prices to come down.

The prices will increase by 50% right? That's what I understood from the Korean video.. this is basically the first time since many years that they changed the laptop and not only some small improvements... Last year was Lunar lake/arrow lake which was a huge improvement, this year it's the rest. Speakers are much bigger too. Sad thing is the price will be outrageous at least for Intel models. I think the non pro sticks with old magnesium chassis right?

Remember it's only full HD display. That saves a lot of GPU/CPU power of higher resolution. Also video playback is something Intel long dialled. Surfing the internet while using keyboard and touchpad and so on is far more demanding.. In tests lunar lake clearly bet arrow lake in this regard. But arrow lake has more multi core power.

I need more battery life. Arrow lake has loads of power but isn't good on idle/low power stuff just like surfing the net or writing documents. Yes arrow lake is already pretty good under high load and a step up. 11-13. Gen were basically identical just more power for more heat... So far sadly haven't seen a 16" below 1300 euros and a 17 below 1200 euros.. Yeah many components not only ram are increasing in price. It it's again supposed to hold 5 years with a single battery replacement I need the Lunar lake. I guess panther will be fine too, but cannot justify the prices. By now I'm actually just waiting for a 32GB ram model to get below 1200 Euros. World is running out of resources be it oil or metals like silver and copper. I fear this is gonna be the last laptop I buy in my life as modernity will collapse around 2030 I expect. I wonder if the 2026 oled models are already having the new subpixel layout that improves text rendering a lot. LG announced them a month ago or so, but I don't remember which resolutions were gonna come first. That would be a big step up for Oled.

Yep right now buying anything else by intel if not at a steep discount really doesn't make sense. If you need a lot of power, it's still AMD, If great battery life then lunar lake.. AMD in theory could still be better about battery life, but Intel simply still has the better ecosystem around the processor so lunar lake effectively edges out most similar AMD models. I'll get an LG gram once prices in offers for a lunar lake are around 900-950 Euros. Or maybe go for something similar by Asus and by it straight in Taiwan where prices are better in general just not for the grams.

You found them with oled? 16Z90RU-G.AA55G For example is just the 2023 model with a new name, it sold for 700 euros so it's a good deal for people not needing something new or with great battery life. 100% they just dug out old stock maybe reserved for warranty or whatever. If battery life is important need actual 2025 model. The battery life went downhill from 2022 and onwards Vs 2021 as intel didn't get it done. Finally at tsmc things improved!

Take the cap off and put it back on for those keys. But basically after trying that a couple of times and getting it back to work for a few weeks it means exchanging the keyboard which is isn't easy as you can read on the previous page. I think it's just the life over of the switches. E will be the most likely to break due to heaviest use in most western languages

It's slowly getting time for replacement - the next default: my top USB-C port isn't charging anymore. The case is slowly warping more as well (the lower part as the upper part is still quite new)... But I'm pretty confident it will survive 5-6 more months until replacement with the current Gen at affordable price. Battery on the other hand has recovered a bit again at 172 full cylcles back to 68.000mWh.. Looking like it will make it to 5 years (well with exchanged keyboard and exchanged battery and exchanged fan). I also feel like the overall brightness isn't where it was when it was new. I usually need to run it now at 90-100% instead of 80% when it was new during the day.

Too small battery, too low resolution, bad keyboard.... It's not really an alternative. My gram is showing its age more and more. Casing kinda would need replacement, USB-C ports getting unreliable, and so on. But gonna wait for sub 1000 Euro pricing on lunar lake gram... Still no other laptop of mine ever survived more than 4 years (had 4 years exactly on Lenovo t440s and around 4 years once on a Dell latitude, now my gram is 4 years 4 months). I do wonder neither Dell not Lenovo try a clone. Samsung has a pretty similar model however. It's a bit more suited to home Vs business use however.

The new battery is dropping fast - now at 147 cycles it's already down to 66.000mWh, the original one I exchanged at 60.000 or so. Seems the main problem is simply aging and even if getting a new original battery as they were produced long time ago - it's a disaster. I found out that Windows 11 completely reset any battery related settings in the registry, so after redoing them battery life got better again, but yeah it's still inferior to Windows 10. Well I guess one more year on the Gram then I will upgrade to a new one. LG from time to time really dumps the old ones at cheap prices.

Updating to Windows 11 I had to notice that nearly all registry settings concerning power saving had been reset and battery life was really really poor. Even worse plugged in it idled at around 11w. Redid all settings and uninstalled all the AI, copilot and whatever stuff plus disabled again loads of windows services I'm down to idling at 3w package power plugged in and the old 0.8w on battery (had been up to 3-4w). The problem is my 11th gen intel doesn't go into lower than C3 if an external monitor is connected/lan is connected via usb-c... With poor coling this really stresses the battery... But whatever I do - Windows 11 is a slouch vs 10. I have a very potent server that now needs 20% more time on an intel 13th gen CPU all else equal vs on Windows 10 on the same tasks. The supposedly improved big/little workload has gone down the hill (with 10 I could manually set tasks to either big or little cores and this doesn't work reliably anymore under 11... Too bad 10 is reaching EOL.

hmm no, 11 stays a piece of shit. My battery life is way worse and not improving. However it's even worse on a compile server I use. That one runs on Intel 13500 CPU, and the main compilation task now runs for 36 hours instead of 25 hours using Bills Process Manager to kinda make sure parallized tasks get moved to big cores for priority, and small cores for unimportant stuff and OS. Under Windows 11 that doesn't work well at all, but the default scheduler is still much worse then the Windows 10 default scheduler. On windows 10 it ran for 28 hours with default scheduler, vs 32 hours on 11. What a piece of trash. I already debloated a lot but I can see that 11 just messes around loads. And yeah antivirus is deactivated on both 10 and 11, because with antivirus active I can add another couple of hours... (compiling stuff with java and packing with 7zip). That speed is just disastrous. I have sadly some things that don't run under Linux, but on Linux the main part of the compilation was like 21 hours only... Problem is - I don't want to be left out on security updates - so there is no way to stay on 10. But for my use cases 11 clearly is rubbish compared to 10. Both on my server as well as on my laptop. The irony of this was that 11 was supposed to work better with little.big cores, but clearly it doesn't and it seems to even interfere with bills process manager that simply can be set up smarter than the automatic windows scheduler. And yeah that scheduler improved somehow, but the additional bloat just cannot be avoided. And yeah I didn't invest much time into debloating 11 yet, and did so considerably for 10. However I updated which should mean most settings stay the same. If I didn't have some software that I need to use that runs on windows only, I would long be Ubuntu only. It's just faster, no thinking about bloat, and way more stable (yeah BSOD are very rare now on windows, some small hiccups and problems quite common however). So the new lg grams must have improved quite a bit if they manage good battery life under 11. I'm pretty sure however AMD is not far behind or same level as Intel. AMD caught up on problems like wifi, bluetooth and so on just being more efficient vs Intel - while Intel still packages themselves instead of full TSMC production (which I'm sure is still better). So intel likely still is a tiny bit better on firmware vs AMD when it comes to low load / idle. I would not want to have an ARM based laptop, as there is again loads of legacy software I need often. Without that I think Gram would be no option for me as I would chose a snapdragon laptop...Since 1 year they really do work well for general use cases (not quite Apple level however - but I cannot work from prison so apple is a nogo for me.

Yeah hard to say where it would end up with IPS. I'm not sure how good the current OLEDs are for text. I kinda would like IPS Black 2.0 technology. That's by LG and how comes they don't use it on their LG gram? It's absolutely the best for 27/32 office displays. Doubling to Trippling the contrast does a lot. Actually I just upgraded my old lg gram to windows 11 , and clearly battery life suffered a lot. It just uses more and I tried already quite some optimization to little help. But yeah there is no help but to upgrade to 11 as 10 support is running out. 11 really is a PITA and I see no single improvement yet...

Well the Lunar lake version looks like a perfect upgrade for me once it is sold for 1000 euros or so. Until then my 2021 will survive. This is actually the first LG gram to match the battery lifetime of the 2021 version, which isn't surprising as it was all the same intel node 2021-2024 and intel added more power being pressured by AMD. Arrow lake loses how much Vs lunar lake on battery life? I guess it's still second best for Intel and only slightly worse than Lunar lake? It's really hard to find same laptop with both processors to compare. Tsmc simply is a huge step forward. I'm sure in real life the battery life is even more ahead Vs the Notebookcheck numbers on wlan testing. And it makes sense to go with IPS for Lunar lake and oled for arrow lake. Actually I think the Lunar lake gram is the first one since a decade to actually beat the MacBook. Macbook still has best display for a laptop imho. It's a shame LG or others don't manage to source microled panels.