Watch It First
Thomann has been selling this exact guitar since February 2004. Twenty-odd years, 340-plus customer ratings, still sitting at four and a half stars. That is not an accident.
The GRG170DX is the bottom rung of the Ibanez ladder – the GIO tier, the one that exists so teenagers can afford a superstrat with a trem and two humbuckers.
I’ve already covered the tier above it in my Ibanez RG421 review and the signature end of the range in the JEM Jr piece. This is the cheap way in. The question is what you actually lose.
It looks the part, which matters more than snobs admit
Sharp double-cutaway body, pointy Ibanez headstock, sharktooth-style inlays running up the neck, all-black hardware, Black Night finish.
Stand it next to a proper RG in a shop and a beginner cannot tell them apart from three metres away. That’s the whole GIO business model and honestly, good – a first guitar that looks cool gets picked up more often, and hours on the fretboard beat spec sheets every single time.
The HSH pickup layout is quietly clever
You get an Infinity humbucker at the bridge, an Infinity single coil in the middle, and an Infinity humbucker at the neck, run through a 5-way switch.
That middle single coil is the bit people overlook. It means this thing does thin, quacky, Strat-adjacent cleans as well as the chunky stuff, which makes it a far more useful practice guitar than a plain HH.
Are the Infinity pickups great? No. They’re a bit flat and compressed compared to anything branded. But they take gain politely, they don’t squeal uncontrollably, and swapping them later is the single most satisfying upgrade you can do to a cheap guitar.
24 frets and a full 25.5-inch scale
The scale is 648 mm, the same as a full-fat RG, and there are 24 medium frets on a New Zealand pine board.
So the geometry of this guitar – string spacing, tension, reach, where everything sits – matches what you’ll play later. If you learn on this and upgrade to a slim-bodied Ibanez S in two years, nothing about the layout surprises you. That’s worth real money.
What the GIO tier actually costs you
People assume the gap between a GIO and a real RG is mostly cosmetic. It isn’t, and it’s worth being precise about where the money goes.
The neck is the big one. A proper RG gets Ibanez’s Wizard profile, which is famously thin and flat. The GRG1 profile here is thin for a budget guitar but noticeably chunkier and rounder than the real thing.
Then there’s the fretwork. Frets on a GIO are levelled to a price, so you’ll sometimes find a high one causing a buzz around the 7th or 12th. A decent tech sorts it in twenty minutes.
And the electronics: budget pots, budget switch, budget jack. The switch is usually the first thing to get crackly after a few years of gigging. All cheap parts, all easy to replace.
What you don’t lose is the geometry – the neck joint, the body contours, the way the horn lets you get at the top frets. Ibanez didn’t cheapen the shape, and that is the part you can’t upgrade later.
Playing it: honest impressions
Unplugged it’s bright and a bit clacky, which is poplar and a bolt-on maple neck doing exactly what you’d expect.
Plugged into a modelling amp with a high-gain patch, it behaves. Fast riffing stays reasonably tight, and the bridge humbucker has enough output that you don’t need to crank an overdrive in front of it to get moving.
Cleans are the pleasant surprise. Positions two and four – humbucker plus middle single coil – give you that hollow, slightly nasal cluck that’s genuinely fun for funk and clean arpeggios. Most cheap metal guitars simply cannot do this at all.
Let’s talk about the tremolo
This is where the corners got cut, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
It’s a Fat-10 bridge with a T102 tremolo – a standard two-point vintage-style unit, no locking nut, no fine tuners. It will do gentle wobbles perfectly happily.
Do a proper divebomb and you will be retuning afterwards. That is simply the nature of a non-locking trem with a plastic nut. Nothing about the GRG170DX is broken; it just isn’t a Floyd Rose guitar and shouldn’t be judged as one.
My advice? Either block the trem with a bit of wood and enjoy rock-solid tuning, or learn to use it lightly. Both are valid. Do not buy this expecting Steve Vai antics.
The niggles nobody mentions in the shop
- Setup out of the box varies wildly. Some arrive playable, some arrive with the action somewhere near the moon. Factor in a setup.
- Plastic nut. The main tuning-stability culprit. A TUSQ replacement transforms it.
- Poplar body. Light, inoffensive, tonally a bit anonymous. Fine.
- Basic tuners. They work. They are not smooth.
- Fret ends can be a little sharp in dry weather – a common budget-guitar trait, easily filed.
None of this is unique to Ibanez. Compare like for like with a Squier Affinity Stratocaster and you’ll find the same story: good bones, cheap fittings.
Who it’s for
Beginners who already know they want to play rock or metal. If someone is going to spend their first year learning power chords and pentatonics with a distortion pedal, this beats a starter Strat copy comfortably.
Also good as a second guitar to leave in an alternate tuning, or a knockabout you don’t mind lending out.
Skip it if you want a Floyd, if you want serious pickups out of the box, or if you’re already gigging. At that point, a Schecter Omen Extreme-6 or the RG421 is a smarter buy.
Specs
- Body: Poplar
- Neck: Maple, GRG1 profile
- Fretboard: New Zealand pine
- Frets: 24 medium
- Scale: 648 mm (25.5″)
- Pickups: Infinity humbucker (bridge), Infinity single coil (middle), Infinity humbucker (neck)
- Switching: 5-way selector
- Bridge: Fat-10 with T102 tremolo
- Hardware: Black
- Finish: Black Night
Final Verdict
The GRG170DX is not a good guitar in absolute terms. It is an outrageously good guitar for what it costs, which is a different and far more useful statement.
Full scale length, 24 frets, a genuinely versatile HSH layout and a body shape that will make a fifteen-year-old want to practise. Everything that’s cheap about it – nut, tuners, pickups – is cheap in ways you can fix later for pocket money.
Twenty years on the shelf and still four and a half stars from hundreds of owners. Sometimes the crowd is just right, lol.
Buy it, get it set up properly, and spend the difference on an amp.
