2023 LG Gram 16 with RTX 3050, first impression and comparison with my old 2021 Gram

[skipper]

Greetings LG Gram fans. I am writing this on my new LG Gram 16 with RTX3050 and 32Gb RAM at the airport. I will add later in the week/next week more detailed impressions and add comparative photos, but just to let you all know that it is a HUGE upgrade from my 2021 11^th generation.

The first immediate and impressive improvement is the display. Much brighter, no reflections, crisper. This has the variable refresh rate which I have the feeling improves massively the battery life . It has the massive  90Wh battery and the Nvidia card is NOT having any influence on battery for most normal productivity uses. Right now I am at 66% and Windows shows 8h20m, brightness at 30%, (seems more like 50% on the old version), wifi on, Chrome and Firefox showing a couple of tabs and writing on Word. Since the display has much less reflections I can also keep the brightness at lower levels and still see better while typing.

Keyboard is very similar, maybe a tad less mushy feeling, crisper and faster feedback, trackpad very similar but clicking is a bit harder, I am tapping more than clicking. And the whole keyboard has much less flex everywhere and underneath in the back the feet resemble the ones from the 12^th gen, much better stability.

And of course it has much better cooling, double the intakes underneath. In High cooling mode, it can become loud, much louder than my old one, but the pitch is lower so I don’t find it disturbing. But under normal use it is super quiet.

For storage it came with two 1Tb Samsung SSDs (SAMSUNG MZVL21TOHCLR-OOBOO), which seem to be the same model, but with the 😧 drive I get no more than 3400MB/s sequential reads at CrystalDiskMark, which is almost half of the 6500 sequential reads of the 😄 drive. In my old Gram I had a PCIE 3.0 drive in the 😧 slot, so I could not see a difference. But here I guess the 2^nd SSD only provides half the speed, a bit disappointing.

The only thing I miss is the fingerprint reader, I keep tapping on the power button. The IR camera is ok indoors, but while I was outdoors under the sun I had to always type my pin.

I have not yet tried to play any games or put the RTX3050 in use.

Don’t hesitate to ask me what you want to know, I will try to do some Cinebench tests soon when I get back home.

In summary, if one wants to upgrade from the 2021 model, I think one should opt for the RTX version.

[John Ratsey]

I'm interested in better cooling/quieter than I've had in the 2021 and 2023 Gram 17s and the twin fan solution on the model with the Nvidia graphics may be one solution. However, I can't justify an upgrade at the moment and it appears that there isn't a UK-specific model with the separate GPU.

 

I've just checked the LG UK website and it mentions "**Modified keyboard location to improve the airflow. Larger fan with more blades. Applied graphite sheet under the keyboard. The advanced cooling feature is in comparison to the preceding model" with this video. Comparing notebookcheck's internal photos of the 2022 and 2023 versions confirms that the latter has a larger diameter fan.

2022

 

2023

This difference isn't mentioned in the notebookcheck review but could well be a factor in the 2023 model being about 50% faster in the benchmark tests than the 2022 model. i7 vs i5 CPUs doesn't make much difference once there's thermal throttling.

 

 

[John Ratsey]

14 hours ago, skipper said:

For storage it came with two 1Tb Samsung SSDs (SAMSUNG MZVL21TOHCLR-OOBOO), which seem to be the same model, but with the 😧 drive I get no more than 3400MB/s sequential reads at CrystalDiskMark, which is almost half of the 6500 sequential reads of the 😄 drive. In my old Gram I had a PCIE 3.0 drive in the 😧 slot, so I could not see a difference. But here I guess the 2^nd SSD only provides half the speed, a bit disappointing

 

I believe that both SSD slots are capable of running at full speed. HWiNFO reports NVMe (PCIe 4x 16.0 GT/s) for both.

 

I've just checked my 2022 Gram 17 which has two SSDs (fitted by me):

Slot 0 - WD SN850 2TB - 6873/4847 MB/s maximum

Slot 1 - WD SN770 2TB - 5054/4646 MB/s maximum

 

This suggests that either one of your Samsung SSDs isn't reaching its potential. That might be because LG has done a deal to get some ultra-cheap sub-standard SSDs to fit as secondary drives or the computer is configured to run the second SSD more slowly (perhaps to get an insignificant power saving). I'm not sure where that could be changed. It might require looking in the BIOS.

 

If you can be sure that the problem is the SSD and you want better performance then the good news is that high capacity SSDs have never been so cheap.

 

PS: Samsung SSD Magician might throw some light on the differences.

[skipper]

I got 9601 in Cinebench R23 multicore, more than double my 2021 Gram. The fans are not louder under load but kick more often but I am getting used to them and the increase in speed that I noticed with some VMs is phenomenal. Have I already mentioned I really prefer the screen? I still miss the fingerprint reader and a USB one I have that was working at the desktop setup with my old Gram is not recognized by this one, it is active in Device Manager but Windows Hello does not find it. Also I spent also hours trying to figure out how to avoid losing the Windows Hello credentials every time I was restarting with the eGPU connected, had to fiddle deep in the BIOS Settings (CRTL+SHIFT+ALT+F7 for the advanced settings).

 

[skipper]

On 5/25/2023 at 9:12 AM, John Ratsey said:

I believe that both SSD slots are capable of running at full speed. HWiNFO reports NVMe (PCIe 4x 16.0 GT/s) for both.

 

I've just checked my 2022 Gram 17 which has two SSDs (fitted by me):

Slot 0 - WD SN850 2TB - 6873/4847 MB/s maximum

Slot 1 - WD SN770 2TB - 5054/4646 MB/s maximum

 

This suggests that either one of your Samsung SSDs isn't reaching its potential. That might be because LG has done a deal to get some ultra-cheap sub-standard SSDs to fit as secondary drives or the computer is configured to run the second SSD more slowly (perhaps to get an insignificant power saving). I'm not sure where that could be changed. It might require looking in the BIOS.

 

If you can be sure that the problem is the SSD and you want better performance then the good news is that high capacity SSDs have never been so cheap.

 

PS: Samsung SSD Magician might throw some light on the differences.

Just finished chatting with LG support in US. He said that the 2nd SSD is for storage and the slower speed is by design. I was seeing in HWinfo64 half the speed in the PCIE bus. Maybe it is also because it has the dGPU and it occupies bandwidth. Anyway, not a big problem, but interesting to know that it is useless to buy a PCIE 4.0 drive for the second SSD. I guess I might use the 970 of my older Gram then.

 

Just a question: Did you do a clean install in the new @2Tb SSD or did you clone the original one? Any advice how to proceed with cloning if I need to keep original factory setup?

 

[John Ratsey]

1 hour ago, skipper said:

Just finished chatting with LG support in US. He said that the 2nd SSD is for storage and the slower speed is by design. I was seeing in HWinfo64 half the speed in the PCIE bus. Maybe it is also because it has the dGPU and it occupies bandwidth. Anyway, not a big problem, but interesting to know that it is useless to buy a PCIE 4.0 drive for the second SSD. I guess I might use the 970 of my older Gram then.

 

Just a question: Did you do a clean install in the new @2Tb SSD or did you clone the original one? Any advice how to proceed with cloning if I need to keep original factory setup?

 

That's an interesting point about the 2nd SSD being slower by design. You are probably correct in assuming that it's due to the dGPU needing some bandwidth on the bus.

 

I'm sure that I cloned the SSD which came with the computer as that saves having to look for and separately install the LG-specific software.

[Steerpike]

On 5/24/2023 at 9:59 AM, skipper said:

Greetings LG Gram fans. I am writing this on my new LG Gram 16 with RTX3050 and 32Gb RAM ...

 

Don’t hesitate to ask me what you want to know, I will try to do some Cinebench tests soon when I get back home.

Can you tell us the exact model number of your LG Gram?  Apologies if it's somewere in the post - just read the whole thing and didn't see it. 

[skipper]

On 7/28/2023 at 8:16 PM, Steerpike said:

Can you tell us the exact model number of your LG Gram?  Apologies if it's somewere in the post - just read the whole thing and didn't see it. 

LG Electronics 16Z90R-A.ADB9U1

As I  explained it is i7 13th gen with the RTX3050, 32Gb RAM and 2x1TB SSDs. It is the US version, I don't think the dGPU version has made its way in most European countries. Still very happy with the upgrade.