The KOREAN laptop you CAN'T buy!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,005 words · ~10 min read
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have you ever looked at something immediately wanted it and then found out
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that for some reason you can't have it
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well that was the experience that i had with this
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the lg ultra pc on the surface it looks
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kind of like an lg gram which i love
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but with a little bit more weight and a lot more performance
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only one small problem it turns out that you can't get this thing outside of
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korea the south korea to be precise
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and i mean look at this look at this amazing promotional video
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that's
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only six seconds long for some reason anyway
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fortunately if you are annoying enough and persistent enough i've often found
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that you can get what you want eventually
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and it works for more than just wedding proposals this
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is the lg ultra pc
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a laptop that has never before been seen
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outside of its homeland
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and the video about it is brought to you by mac weldon mack weldon makes high
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quality clothing be it t-shirts underwear
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see that right there mac weldon underwear my cat scratched me mac weldon
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can do nothing to protect you from cat scratches if it's not you know actually
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where the underwear is anyway my talking points are not actually on there so uh
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they make underwear t-shirts socks wallets and more and you can check them
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out using offer code tech tips to save 20 at the link in the video description
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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
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let's open this baby up
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instructions unclear got bag stuck on head of a baby
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um all right
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okay so if you're into that sort of thing lg includes a nice little
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man satchel it's probably cooler in korea than it is
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here
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yep all right
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so aside from the actually pretty good feeling and presumably stylish carry bag
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and a power adapter pretty much the only thing in the box
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is the ultra pc itself
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and it looks pretty much exactly like i expected
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it's a big fat gram
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overall it's not that heavy for a 15 inch model it's about two centimeters
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thick at its thickest point so again not unreasonably thick and in
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terms of build quality like
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it's kind of honestly it's kind of hard to describe it because it's like it does
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feel in some places
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pretty nice um but then
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that's definitely more keyboard flex than we'd like to see and this is
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something that has been an ongoing critique of ours about lg's notebooks
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i o wise it's reasonable but not exceptional so you got your HDMI
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headphone micro sd usb
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a couple usb 3s a type c usb3 not Thunderbolt and gigabit Ethernet
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let's fire this thing up shall we
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is that their slogan in korea
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hi there i'm cortana and i'm here to help
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a little sign in here a touch of wi-fi there and we'll have your pc ready for
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all you plan to do and if you'd like me to stay quiet you can just mute your pc
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if you need an assistive screen reader press the
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why is this in english why does it take so long like what is the point of
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pre-loading all of this stuff so it asks me what region but it asks me
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in english it's weird this looks like a
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bog standard us layout keyboard just with
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alternate korean characters on it
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no i don't want to make cortana my personal assistant under the hood there's a couple of
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things about the specs that stood out to us it's got an 8550 u so that's a quad
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core low power processor 8 gigs of RAM though it depends what sku
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you get as always 240 gig SSD 500 gig
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hard drive and the big one was that it comes with a GeForce gtx 1050 so what we
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were hoping for was with that low power processor but a discrete graphics card
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in a larger clam shell was a nice balance of battery life
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performance and even the ability to game
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a little bit hopefully at a decent price
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let's start let's do that okay so first step is to
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jump on nine night and get all our stuff set up
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and we will be right back even lg's own software on here is like
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in english mind you i didn't install english Windows cortana i already i told you no
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i just told you no so these are just control and alt
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so instead of just labeling both of them twice they just hedged their bets they figured
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well they'll infer from this control and alt that that's also control and alt and
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vice versa the only korean only software on here is
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their support number so we've got all our software loaded up
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now and one of the first things that we do anytime a notebook hits our lab is
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slap it with a stress test so stress fpu
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hit that and almost immediately we noticed
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something really interesting about this particular model
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it detects that it is thermal throttling
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and in fact its clock speed does get reduced
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but the CPU is only sitting at about 60
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high to 70 low degrees on each of the individual cores so it would appear as
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though the t-junction temperature was
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misconfigured by the manufacturer now
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their intent may have been to allow the CPU to burst up during light loads
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but still not pass a bunch of heat through to the user
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when it's under a long strenuous load but this does seem like a fairly extreme
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approach if that was their intent
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you know overall it really is a testament to how far entry-level
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slash mainstream graphics cards have come that you can play doom on a machine
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like this with a gtx 1050 and have not a
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bad experience like i'm running it at high and i'm seeing dips down to below
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30 FPS but like it's very playable
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especially considering the fairly assy
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speakers on the gram the speakers are not bad and i still
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maintain that at laptop screen sizes 1080p resolution is
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adequately sufficient though it would be nice if it was a touch screen enough of
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that let's take it apart so poking around in here there are a
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couple of takeaways number one is that i'm a little confused as to why
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lg felt the need to have the CPU thermal throttle
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which supports our hypothesis that that was
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sort of an accident because the two heat pipes connected to the CPU actually go
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to both of these heat exchangers here
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you can see our GPU over here upgradable RAM so we've got two sodium
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slots uh one of which is empty on our eight gig model but that would be a nice
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and easy upgrade and actually overall upgradability of this device is pretty
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good you've got an m.2 slot here that one is populated and then you've also
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got room for a two and a half inch hard drive which is also populated but you
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could swap those out for something else should you desire moving on to the
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battery we've got a respectable 60 watt
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hours that did give us about four hours in our standard battery test but i did
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feel a little disappointed by this just because lg has built such a brand
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identity for themselves on the ground side of things around having these
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massive capacity batteries in these thin and light devices and this one
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just didn't meet my expectations there and there are a handful of other
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complaints that i have about it as well
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first of all the keyboard is
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crap there are two major problems with it one
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there's a nice tactile bump but the actuation point is pretty much at the
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bottom of the stroke and two the chassis just isn't stiff
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enough around my right hand like it's noticeably more flexible compared to my
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left causing me to regularly miss keystrokes in like this whole half of
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the keyboard here now to be clear it's not the worst
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keyboard i've ever used but i would put it below say a dell inspiron
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the trackpad is good enough no issues but it also didn't wow me and
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it's pretty small by today's standards so it gets a
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fine out of amazing and honestly that's not a bad summary of
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this device as a whole everything from the performance
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to the bezels to the webcam is
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fine except for one big problem the pricing
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so if you're part of the 0.3
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of our audience that is in south korea it's actually not a terrible option but
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if like us you were hoping that this would be something like the xiaomi
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notebook pro which wasn't the best laptop we'd ever seen but was priced
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well enough to be worth the hassle of getting it here from china
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then you're in for a rude awakening due to south korea's fairly harsh import
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regulations and taxes samsung and lg
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don't need to be quite as competitive in their home market
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so this laptop at sixteen hundred
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dollars would be up against much more premium competitors
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outside of south korea another example of this is the samsung galaxy s8
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a phone that may have actually been made in south korea but that costs a hundred
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and thirty dollars more to buy there
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hooray for oligopolies but
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it's not a huge loss because even if lg was to bring the ultra pc to the rest of
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the world which they've said they have no plans to do
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the value proposition wouldn't be amazing
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with a couple more generations of improvement particularly to the
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stiffness of the chassis and to the keyboard
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lg may be in a position where with the right pricing they could expand their
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notebook line internationally though so
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let's see if they do it
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speaking of seeing now is the time to see the link in the video description to
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delivered right to your door and for a limited time dollar shave club is
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most popular products to help you stay fresh and clean so you'll get their
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shave butter their body wash and their one wipe charlie's butt wipes a focus
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set of cartridges is included and then after the first box replacement
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cartridges for the razer are sent for just a few bucks a month the software is
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exclusively available at dollarshaveclub.com Linus we're going to have that linked
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below so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
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button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking
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out where to buy the stuff we featured
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maybe we'll just have like a comparable laptop that's like cheaper down there uh
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at the link in the video description also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and
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our community forum which you should totally join