 I haven't been shy about my love for the LG Gram 14 inch, which has been in my backpack since I reviewed it back in March. And now there is finally something that might be able to knock it off its pedestal. The LG Gram 13 inch and 15 inch. They're still super lightweight, but they now pack double the CPU core count for better performance. And speaking of better, today's video is brought to you by Be Quiet. The Dark Base 700 is a way to make your system look better. It's a versatile case with RGB LED lighting, plus a tempered glass side panel window and more. Check it out at the link below. Opening up the 15 inch LG Gram late 2017. It looks almost identical to the older revision. And only a highly trained eye would be likely to spot any differences without resorting to opening up CPU-Z to check the CPU model. As for the 14 inch model, well, that's easier because it just doesn't exist anymore. To replace it, the 13 inch model has gained a bit of heft, making it the same weight as the outgoing 14. But you get some extra benefits for the small amount of additional arm strain, including 40% more cooling and a much stiffer chassis. I was initially a little upset, but I ended up not minding this move much. Practically speaking, the inch didn't make much difference for me. So what we're going to do is focus on the 13 inch for the rest of this video. I.O. on both of the new models is identical and unchanged from last generation. HDMI, two USB 3.0 Type A's and a Type C is reasonable enough for a modern ultra portable. But the inclusion of Thunderbolt 3 would have made it nearly perfect for use with an external GPU box. As expected from LG, the IPS display looks great with accurate colors and very deep blacks. Although the webcam is still pretty mediocre, especially in this professional slash business class of products. And the placement straight up sucks. As for the screen hinge, it's still wobblier than I'd like for a touchscreen. But it lifts with one finger and is definitely solid enough for non touch use. The slight increase in weight hasn't taken away from the startling lightness of the gram. And I really think once again that the trade-off, adding a bit more weight generation by generation, but adding features was justified. In day to day use, the stiffer chassis really changes the experience. Let's take typing for example. I already liked the last generation's keyboard. So for me, this is just more of a good thing. But even though as far as I can tell, nothing in the switches themselves actually changed, this crisper feel for people like Alex and James was the difference between liking it and not liking it at all. And this carries through to the trackpad as well. It's still not amazing and this fingerprint reader in the top left, that's a rotten position, makes it feel even smaller. But it's definitely better. Back to that fingerprint scanner. Fingerprint recognition, unless it's integrated somewhere sensible like the power button, is pretty trash in my opinion. Windows Hello facial recognition would be a welcome addition to a future LG gram. Now the other big change with this iteration is the addition of 40% more cooling capacity for that new core i7 8550U quad core hyper threaded processor. It finally happened. Dual core is dead and long live quad core. Now, this is not even the most powerful ultrabook we've seen yet. NVMe storage was left out as a cost saving measure and the gram tops out in the mid 70s with all cores running at a very unimpressive 1.8 GHz. But this should still amount to a massive increase in real world performance. And bam! Right out of the gate in Cinebench multi-threaded, the new gram is 56% faster than the old one. Meaning that if even occasionally you find yourself dealing with a heavier workload, this will make a huge difference. Putting tasks like photo editing or even light video editing on the table for the gram. But with great power comes great power consumption. If all you want to do is browse the internet and edit Word documents, things that the old gram with its dual core handled just fine, is it possible that this battery life trade-off isn't worth it? Well, that one's going to be up to you. The new gram scored only 7 hours and 20 minutes in our work battery life test. To be clear, this is still leagues ahead of most other laptops. But at about two hours less than the seventh gen model, it's less, wow, amazing and more pretty darn good. What isn't taken into account here though, is that during those 7 hours and 20 minutes, the new gram was getting a lot more work done. So, this is cool. If you take the same non-intensive task, like watching a video or editing a Word document, the new gram actually outperforms the old version. Fortunately, one thing that wasn't touched was the upgradeability. I mean, there isn't a whole lot that you can do in here, but it is nice that on the 15 inch, the M.2 SSD and RAM can be upgraded down the road, or with that empty slot in our 13 inch, we can just upgrade it right now. Yum, 16 gigs. All right then, the LG gram has always been astonishingly light and it remains that way still. But with the dramatically increased performance and on the 13 inch model, the improved build quality, it's gone from a notebook that made some serious compromises in the name of lightness, to a serious notebook that is still lighter than anything else in its size class. And it does this without being unreasonably priced. Highly recommended. As for the 15 inch model, it's also more powerful, but it's very clear where LG's engineers invested their effort this time around. We all prefer the 13. On the subject of preferring things, you might find that if you try it out, you prefer Ting. Ting is the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction first. When you call them, you don't speak to a robot, you get put through directly to a person, and you don't even pay extra for the privilege. The average Ting bill is just 23 bucks a month per device, and you only pay for exactly the airtime and data that you use. If you're stuck in a contract and switch to Ting, they'll cover 25% of your cancellation fee, up to 75 bucks, and they've got lowered mobile data rates. Data is just $10 a gig beyond the first gig. Pretty cool. So head over to lightness.ting.com, key in how much you're paying right now and how much you use, and try out their savings calculator, and it'll spit out how much you'd save on Ting. When you sign up at our link, you'll also get 25 bucks in service credit or towards a new device. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured, especially the 13-inch, in the video description. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.