LG Gram 14 (2020) Review

When it comes to laptops, there are hundreds to choose from in different form factors and designed differently. But if you want a lightweight laptop that offers great specs, your options can soon shrink.

That’s where LG’s Gram series of laptops come in, they’re lightweight (max 2.98lbs/1350g) and comes with up to an 10th Gen Intel Core i7 and 16GB RAM (with support for 24GB of RAM total).

I’ve been testing LG’s Gram 14 (model 14Z90N) for about a week or so and while it’s light to carry, it comes with a few downsides.

Design & Hardware

As the name implies, the LG Gram 14 comes with a 14-inch Full HD IPS display which looks good but it seemed to have some issues regarding the brightness.

The body of the Gram 14 is made from magnesium alloy which helps make it lighter at around 999g (2.2lbs). When carrying the Gram 14 around it literally feels like you’re not holding anything at all. It feels like there could be something missing in the laptop because of how light it is. Although it feels similar to plastic, LG assures me that the body of the laptop is made from metal. It’s very similar to the Google Pixel 2 XL which used aluminum.

The base of the laptop feels solid while the upper half with the display feels cheaper and has some flex to it.

The Gram 14’s keyboard is fairly nice to type on with a good amount of travel and is backlit but I didn’t find them to be all that bright. In the top right corner of the keyboard is the power button and the Window Hello fingerprint reader.

The fingerprint reader worked fairly well and logged into the laptop quickly. I wish LG would have included an IR camera for face recognition support for Windows Hello.

The trackpad was click and mostly responsive but I had occasional issues when clicking.

For ports, the Gram 14 has a DC-in for charging using the slight bulky power adapter, 2 USB 3.1 Type-A ports, Thunderbolt 3 USB-C port, HDMI out, headphone jack and a microSD card slot.

If you don’t want to carry around the laptop’s power adapter, the Gram 14 can be charged over USB-C.

The battery in the Gram 14 is 72 Wh which LG says you can get up to 18.5 hours but realistically, you’ll be getting closer to 8-10 hours with normal usage.

The model I tested of the Gram 14 came with the 10th Gen Intel Core i5 processor with Intel Iris Plus Graphics, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. There is a version of the Gram 14 that has a 10th Gen i7 processor and double the RAM and 512GB SSD.

When using the Gram 14, I had no issues when it came to slowdowns and the system ran fairly quiet and didn’t get warm during usage.

LG says their Gram laptops support up to 24GB of RAM thanks to an extra RAM slot in each model.

The LG Gram 14 costs $1,599 CAD for the model I tested and the i7 version of the Gram 14 is $1,649 CAD.

If you need a bigger screen, you can step up to the Gram 15 which starts at $1,699 CAD to $1,899 CAD depending on specs.

The Gram 17 starts at $1,799 CAD and goes up to $2,199 CAD.

The LG Gram (2020) laptops are available now from Best Buy Canada, Costco, Amazon and Canada Computers. As of this review, I couldn’t find any Gram laptops listed on Best Buy’s website but the other retailers did have them listed.