LG Gram Pro 16 16Z90SP Review

Verdict

A gorgeous big-screen laptop that seems unfeasibly thin and light, though the optional dedicated GPU doesn’t add much to the party.

Introduction

The old wisdom was that you could have a lightweight laptop, a fast laptop or a laptop with a big screen, but you couldn’t have all three at once. If so, it’s wisdom that LG ignored with the Gram 17 back in 2019, and that it’s carried on ignoring ever since.

The new LG Gram Pro repeats the old trick of combining a 16-inch screen with an incredibly lightweight body, without crippling performance. In fact, at 1199 to 1279g, depending on the version, it’s the lightest 16-inch laptop money can currently buy. Yet the version we’re testing still packs in an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU and an NVIDIA RTX 3050 GPU, potentially making it the most capable and versatile Gram yet.

I’ve spent the last week using this frankly implausibly slim and light laptop, and I’ve got some thoughts on where it excels – plus the odd point on where it falls short.

Design and keyboard

• Just 13 to 14.4mm thick and up to 1.279Kg in weight
• Limited connectivity, but what you get is fast
• Spacious keyboard and trackpad make for great usability

Every now and then I pick up the Gram Pro 16 and feel like I’m somehow being bamboozled. It has the 16-inch screen of a desktop replacement laptop and the same kind of 379 x 259mm footprint, yet it’s ridiculously light; light enough to pick up by one corner without any tangible effort. If you spend a lot of time on the road but feel cramped by a 13 to 14-inch screen, then nothing else really comes close.

Yet, despite its waiflike 13 to 14.4mm thickness, it’s also tough. The magnesium-alloy shell feels sturdy across the board, though there’s a little more flex in the lid than with some displays, and the powder-coated black finish is pretty stunning. There’s a ventilation grill at the bottom and a larger vent at the rear between the hinges, but otherwise little to spoil the clean lines.

If you want a laptop to turn heads, the Gram Pro 16 has the goods. My only grumble is that the crisp edges at the front aren’t actually all that comfortable if you have your wrists and palms resting below the keyboard as you’re typing, causing some very minor irritation. Of course, that might just be my own typing posture at fault, but it is worth mentioning.

Choosing a laptop this thin and this light means some inevitable compromises when it comes to connectivity, but they’re not too bad. You still get two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports on the left, both supporting USB-PD, DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 4. You also get two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports on the right-hand side. Even more unexpected is the HDMI 2.1 output on the left.

One of the Type-C ports will be occupied for some hours a day in charging via the compact 90W USB-C charger, but that’s not a huge problem in this case, and LG gets some extra brownie points for the lengthy, removable cable on the charger. You can plug in another USB-C to USB-C cable, should you need to. Meanwhile, with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 onboard, you’re well-served for wireless connectivity.

One bonus upside of the 16-inch screen size is that there’s so much space for the keyboard, enabling LG to go for something that almost feels full-sized, complete with a numeric pad. Look closely and there has been some shrinkage – the numeric pad is narrow, the left Shift is a split-key affair with the backslash, the Return key isn’t full height and the cursors are tiny. Yet the keys have a decent, firm feel with little travel but a crisp, responsive action. I’m typing on it right now and it already feels speedy, effective and familiar.

The touchpad is equally spacious, measuring 13 x 8.2cm, and also a pleasure to use. I’d still want a mouse for anything fiddly, but for navigating websites or the Windows UI, or even a quick spot of image-editing, I found it to be perfectly fine, with a surface your fingers can just glide across.

LG doesn’t make any claims about the Gram Pro 16’s green credentials, but it has committed to going carbon neutral by 2030 and to moving completely to renewable energy by 2050. The vast majority of the packaging is simple folded cardboard.

Screen

• 16-inch OLED panel with 16:10 aspect ratio and 2880 x 1800 resolution
• 100% sRGB and DCI-P3 coverage
• Surprisingly good audio at low to medium volume

For many users, the OLED screen will be a massive selling point. The 16-inch size and 2880 x 1800 resolution make a perfect combination for productivity or creative work, giving you plenty of space to work across multiple windows or deal with complex image or video-editing apps. It’s not incredibly bright – I measured SDR brightness levels of 397 nits – but the zero nit blacks and perfect contrast also make it great for entertainment. Colours are rich and punchy, detail is fantastic and HDR content looks superb.

Colour reproduction is also good enough for creative purposes. The screen covers 100% of the sRGB gamut with a volume of 173.3%, along with 100% of DCI-P3 and 96.5% of Adobe RGB. Colour accuracy is just as fantastic, with an ultra-low average Delta E of just 0.53. The screen even supports refresh rates of up to 120Hz.

There are limits to what you can do in terms of audio with a device this thin and light, but there’s more body and bass here than you might expect, and it copes well with background music and film soundtracks at low to medium volume. You won’t have any issues hearing friends or colleagues in video calls and meetings, either, while the onboard mics do a solid job of capturing your voice without excess background noise. LG’s webcam doesn’t deliver the sharpest or most detailed footage I’ve seen, but it’s good enough for meetings and handles tricky lighting situations well.

Performance

• Core Ultra 7 155H balances performance, energy efficiency and basic AI acceleration
• Onboard RTX 3050 GPU promises an extra burst of 3D power
• 1TB to 2TB of fast SSD storage

There’s nothing unusual about the Gram Pro 16’s CPU – it’s the Meteor Lake Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, with six of Intel’s P cores running 12 threads at up to 4.8GHz, plus eight E cores and two low power E cores running a further 10 threads. It’s fast, it has a built in Neural Processing Unit for AI, plus an integrated Arc GPU.

However, here it’s paired with an NVIDIA’s RTX 3050 GPU with 4GB of RAM, running at 45W. It’s a slightly odd choice when the superior RTX 4050 should have worked within the same power budget and packed in more shader cores to boot; 2560 to the RTX 3050’s 2048, but we assume there’s some rationale in terms of costs or engineering.

Performance in synthetic benchmarks and mainstream productivity apps is pretty much what we expect from a Core Ultra 7 155H with 32GB of RAM. matching similarly-specced machines like the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED and Acer Swift Go 14. In the Cinebench R23 rendering benchmark, it’s a close match for the Zenbook, but not quite as speedy as the bigger, more heavily cooled Swift Go 14. Either way, it’s fast enough to run demanding applications smoothly and fluidly. However, the new breed of Copilot+ PCs powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite CPUs are now delivering superior results in Geekbench 6, so the Core 7 Ultra no longer feels quite as state-of-the-art as it once did.

The Gram Pro 16 pulls ahead of those machines in 3D performance, but not by a whole lot. Its score in the 3DMark TimeSpy benchmark (2683) isn’t much in advance of the results I’ve seen on previous Core Ultra 7 laptops using their integrated Arc GPU, and when I tried running Cyberpunk 2077, I couldn’t get the frame rate above 22fps even with DLSS turned on and the graphics preset switched to Low or Medium. The RTX 3050 will provide some 3D support in older games and graphically-intensive applications, but it’s a chip that’s ageing fast.

Luckily, you can’t say anything negative about the Gram Pro 16’s storage. WIth sequential read/write speeds of 7157MB/sec and 6459MB/sec, the Hynix PC801 SSDs are about as speedy as mainstream laptop storage gets, and our test sample came with two 1TB drives to play with.

Software

• Suite of LG utilities comes pre-installed
• Some useful tools, and all very easy-to-use

LG doesn’t go too big on third-party bloatware, barring the pre-installed McAfee anti-virus software, but it does like to throw in some branded utilities. LG Smart Assistant gives you access to a bunch of system settings, display settings and cooling modes, along with customisable schemes for different activities. It’s not as comprehensive as the system tools supplied with many gaming laptops, but you could argue that it’s more intuitive and easier to get to grips with.

Meanwhile, Security Guard watches your laptop while you’re away to dish out an alarm and a warning email if suspicious movement nearby is detected. LG Update and Recovery covers updates to drivers, Windows and apps, along with drive backup and drive and system recovery tools. It’s mostly a front end for features already baked into Windows, but again it’s a bit more approachable than many system tools. Finally, LG Gram Link can be used to transfer files between your laptop and Android devices.

Battery life

• Expect up to 12 hours of light office work, video streaming or browsing
• Battery level drops by 10% in an hour of streaming at full brightness

If you think the slimness and weight of the Gram Pro border are borderline miraculous, prepare to be bowled over by its battery life. 12 hours in PC Mark 10’s Modern Office battery benchmark is pretty impressive for a laptop with a 16-inch screen, even if it’s not quite up there with the epic battery life of the Snapdragon X Elite-powered Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge.

Left to stream 4K video for an hour at full brightness, the battery went down by just 10%. That’s 3% more than we saw with the Galaxy Book 4 Edge, but still a great result by the standards of many other Intel laptops.

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