LG launches 17-inch laptop with RTX 3050 Ti GPU, DDR5 RAM for $1,600

Expand / LG announced the 17" Ultra PC (17U70Q) this week. LG

LG on Tuesday announced the LG Ultra PC 17" (17U70Q), offering a large screen and RTX 3050 Ti mobile graphics card in a laptop measuring 0.78 inches thin. The announcement of LG describes it as a "mobile workstation" that matches the style of LG's Gram series of ultra-portable laptops; however, there are more powerful competitors.

LG has announced a configuration for the 17U70Q, and it has 512GB of storage. The laptop is said to have one NVMe PCIe 4.0 slot and one older, slower NVMe PCIe 3.0 slot. More storage would help the machine compete better with other slim workstation cases, like the Dell XPS 15 9520. We asked LG if the machine is user-upgradeable and will update this piece if we have an answer.

Like the XPS 15, the 17" Ultra PC features an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics card with 4GB of GDDR6 and 16GB of dual-channel DDR5-4800 RAM.

LG's 17-inch PC is also equipped with an Intel Core i7-1260P processor. We've seen this processor in recently tested ultralights that lack dedicated graphics cards, including the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga. The chip has four performance cores (2.1 to 4.7 GHz), eight efficient cores (1.5 to 3.4 GHz), 16 threads and 18 MB of cache. Spec-wise, the i7-1260P isn't as powerful as Intel's 12th-gen H-series chips, which have higher base power and max turbo power consumption and are in the XPS 15 or even the i7-1280P (six performance cores at 1.8-4.8 GHz, eight efficiency cores at 1.3-3.6 GHz, 20 threads and 24 MB cache) that we tested in the Dell XPS 13 Plus.

Enlarge / The laptop weighs 4.37 pounds. LG

The machine's 17-inch screen has an aspect ratio of 16:10 with 2560 x 1600 pixels. LG claims that its IPS display can cover at least 95% of DCI-P3 and reach 350 nits brightness.

LG claims up to nine hours of battery life from the machine's 80Wh battery, but hasn't revealed how it hit that figure. Port selection, meanwhile, could be worse for a 0.78-inch-thick laptop. There are three USB-A ports, a Thunderbolt 4 port, HDMI 2.1, a 3.5mm jack, a Micro SD card reader and Ethernet RJ45.

The new 17-inch machine also includes a feature increasingly common in laptops: a webcam and AI software that can detect if the user is in front of the PC. The feature, called Glance, locks the computer if the user is no longer within 13 to 29 inches of the camera and blurs the screen if someone is looking over their shoulder. For multi-monitor setups, the computer can also tell which screen you're looking at and automatically bring your cursor there. The underlying tech comes from Mirametrix, and when we tested it in Lenovo's IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro, it came with the creepiness of an always-on webcam, a pair of annoying lights, and it causes...