27 inch 1440p monitor, about 6.5 kg with the VESA plate, sitting on a 25 mm particleboard desk. The generic arm I bought last year has started drooping about 4 cm overnight and the tilt knob strips if I look at it wrong. I move the monitor maybe twice a week, so I'm not paying for daily reconfiguration. Is the LX worth it for someone whose main requirement is that the thing stays where it's put?
Bought the LX four years ago mostly to kill a wobble. It has not moved a millimetre since. The thing nobody mentions: the spring tension is set with an Allen key and you have to actually set it for your monitor's weight. Out of the box it's tensioned for something heavier. Every person I've seen complain that their LX 'floats up on its own' skipped that step and blamed the arm.
If you move it twice a week, an arm is arguably the wrong purchase entirely. A fixed VESA riser or a pole mount will hold position forever and costs less than either arm you're comparing. I sold my LX after realising I was paying for a range of motion I used about once a month.
The reason to buy an arm isn't motion though, it's reclaiming the desk surface and being able to push the screen further back than any stand allows. My eye strain dropped when I got the monitor out to arm's length, and no riser would have let me.
Went from a £35 arm to a used LX off a local listing for roughly half retail. The difference was immediate and extremely boring: it just stays where you put it. Used office-furniture stock is worth a look for this kind of thing — these arms outlive the companies that buy them in bulk.
Your desk is 25 mm particleboard, so whatever arm you buy, put a steel plate or a very large washer under the clamp. I pressed a permanent dent into a laminate top with a clamp that was well within spec on paper.
@nightbus_nadia · 5d ago · 3 replies
The LX is rated 3.2-11.3 kg and carries a 10-year warranty. Your 6.5 kg sits comfortably mid-range, which is the whole point — cheap arms quote a maximum that assumes a perfectly centred, perfectly balanced load, and then sag at about 60% of it. If you're near the top of a budget arm's rated range you get exactly the overnight droop you're describing.
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@cors_error_cleo · 4d ago
Mine claims 9 kg. So I'm sitting at 72% of rated. That tracks depressingly well with what it's doing.
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@northwindow_nia · 5d ago
Check the clamp too. A decent share of reported 'sag' is the clamp slowly rotating on a soft desk edge rather than the gas strut giving up.
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