have you ever looked at something immediately wanted it and then found out
that for some reason you can't have it
well that was the experience that i had with this
the lg ultra pc on the surface it looks
kind of like an lg gram which i love
but with a little bit more weight and a lot more performance
only one small problem it turns out that you can't get this thing outside of
korea the south korea to be precise
and i mean look at this look at this amazing promotional video
that's
only six seconds long for some reason anyway
fortunately if you are annoying enough and persistent enough i've often found
that you can get what you want eventually
and it works for more than just wedding proposals this
is the lg ultra pc
a laptop that has never before been seen
outside of its homeland
and the video about it is brought to you by mac weldon mack weldon makes high
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i mean realistically if there were instructions for how to open the box they weren't going to be in english so
let's open this baby up
instructions unclear got bag stuck on head of a baby
um all right
okay so if you're into that sort of thing lg includes a nice little
man satchel it's probably cooler in korea than it is
here
yep all right
so aside from the actually pretty good feeling and presumably stylish carry bag
and a power adapter pretty much the only thing in the box
is the ultra pc itself
and it looks pretty much exactly like i expected
it's a big fat gram
overall it's not that heavy for a 15 inch model it's about two centimeters
thick at its thickest point so again not unreasonably thick and in
terms of build quality like
it's kind of honestly it's kind of hard to describe it because it's like it does
feel in some places
pretty nice um but then
that's definitely more keyboard flex than we'd like to see and this is
something that has been an ongoing critique of ours about lg's notebooks
i o wise it's reasonable but not exceptional so you got your HDMI
headphone micro sd usb
a couple usb 3s a type c usb3 not Thunderbolt and gigabit Ethernet
let's fire this thing up shall we
is that their slogan in korea
hi there i'm cortana and i'm here to help
a little sign in here a touch of wi-fi there and we'll have your pc ready for
all you plan to do and if you'd like me to stay quiet you can just mute your pc
if you need an assistive screen reader press the
why is this in english why does it take so long like what is the point of
pre-loading all of this stuff so it asks me what region but it asks me
in english it's weird this looks like a
bog standard us layout keyboard just with
alternate korean characters on it
no i don't want to make cortana my personal assistant under the hood there's a couple of
things about the specs that stood out to us it's got an 8550 u so that's a quad
core low power processor 8 gigs of RAM though it depends what sku
you get as always 240 gig SSD 500 gig
hard drive and the big one was that it comes with a GeForce gtx 1050 so what we
were hoping for was with that low power processor but a discrete graphics card
in a larger clam shell was a nice balance of battery life
performance and even the ability to game
a little bit hopefully at a decent price
let's start let's do that okay so first step is to
jump on nine night and get all our stuff set up
and we will be right back even lg's own software on here is like
in english mind you i didn't install english Windows cortana i already i told you no
i just told you no so these are just control and alt
so instead of just labeling both of them twice they just hedged their bets they figured
well they'll infer from this control and alt that that's also control and alt and
vice versa the only korean only software on here is
their support number so we've got all our software loaded up
now and one of the first things that we do anytime a notebook hits our lab is
slap it with a stress test so stress fpu
hit that and almost immediately we noticed
something really interesting about this particular model
it detects that it is thermal throttling
and in fact its clock speed does get reduced
but the CPU is only sitting at about 60
high to 70 low degrees on each of the individual cores so it would appear as
though the t-junction temperature was
misconfigured by the manufacturer now
their intent may have been to allow the CPU to burst up during light loads
but still not pass a bunch of heat through to the user
when it's under a long strenuous load but this does seem like a fairly extreme
approach if that was their intent
you know overall it really is a testament to how far entry-level
slash mainstream graphics cards have come that you can play doom on a machine
like this with a gtx 1050 and have not a
bad experience like i'm running it at high and i'm seeing dips down to below
30 FPS but like it's very playable
especially considering the fairly assy
speakers on the gram the speakers are not bad and i still
maintain that at laptop screen sizes 1080p resolution is
adequately sufficient though it would be nice if it was a touch screen enough of
that let's take it apart so poking around in here there are a
couple of takeaways number one is that i'm a little confused as to why
lg felt the need to have the CPU thermal throttle
which supports our hypothesis that that was
sort of an accident because the two heat pipes connected to the CPU actually go
to both of these heat exchangers here
you can see our GPU over here upgradable RAM so we've got two sodium
slots uh one of which is empty on our eight gig model but that would be a nice
and easy upgrade and actually overall upgradability of this device is pretty
good you've got an m.2 slot here that one is populated and then you've also
got room for a two and a half inch hard drive which is also populated but you
could swap those out for something else should you desire moving on to the
battery we've got a respectable 60 watt
hours that did give us about four hours in our standard battery test but i did
feel a little disappointed by this just because lg has built such a brand
identity for themselves on the ground side of things around having these
massive capacity batteries in these thin and light devices and this one
just didn't meet my expectations there and there are a handful of other
complaints that i have about it as well
first of all the keyboard is
crap there are two major problems with it one
there's a nice tactile bump but the actuation point is pretty much at the
bottom of the stroke and two the chassis just isn't stiff
enough around my right hand like it's noticeably more flexible compared to my
left causing me to regularly miss keystrokes in like this whole half of
the keyboard here now to be clear it's not the worst
keyboard i've ever used but i would put it below say a dell inspiron
the trackpad is good enough no issues but it also didn't wow me and
it's pretty small by today's standards so it gets a
fine out of amazing and honestly that's not a bad summary of
this device as a whole everything from the performance
to the bezels to the webcam is
fine except for one big problem the pricing
so if you're part of the 0.3
of our audience that is in south korea it's actually not a terrible option but
if like us you were hoping that this would be something like the xiaomi
notebook pro which wasn't the best laptop we'd ever seen but was priced
well enough to be worth the hassle of getting it here from china
then you're in for a rude awakening due to south korea's fairly harsh import
regulations and taxes samsung and lg
don't need to be quite as competitive in their home market
so this laptop at sixteen hundred
dollars would be up against much more premium competitors
outside of south korea another example of this is the samsung galaxy s8
a phone that may have actually been made in south korea but that costs a hundred
and thirty dollars more to buy there
hooray for oligopolies but
it's not a huge loss because even if lg was to bring the ultra pc to the rest of
the world which they've said they have no plans to do
the value proposition wouldn't be amazing
with a couple more generations of improvement particularly to the
stiffness of the chassis and to the keyboard
lg may be in a position where with the right pricing they could expand their
notebook line internationally though so
let's see if they do it
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below so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking
out where to buy the stuff we featured
maybe we'll just have like a comparable laptop that's like cheaper down there uh
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