LG on Tuesday announced the LG Ultra PC 17″ (17U70Q) with a large screen and RTX 3050 Ti mobile graphics card in a 0.78-inch thin laptop. style of the LG Gram series of ultraportable laptops, but there are more powerful competitors.
LG has announced one configuration for the 17U70Q with 512 GB of memory. The laptop is said to have one NVMe PCIe 4.0 slot and one older, slower NVMe PCIe 3.0 slot. More memory would help the machine compete better with other slim workstation-style clamshells like the Dell XPS 15 9520. We asked LG if the machine could be upgraded by the user and will update that part if we hear back.
Like the XPS 15, the 17-inch Ultra PC features an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics card with 4GB of GDDR6 memory 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 ultralight devices without dedicated graphics cards, including the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga. The chip has four high-performance cores (2.1-4.7GHz), eight efficient cores (1.5-3.4GHz), 16 threads, and 18MB of cache. In terms of specs, the i7-1260P isn’t as powerful as Intel’s 12th gen H-series chips, which have higher base power and maximum turbo power consumption found in the XPS 15 or even the i7-1280P (six performance cores at 1. 8-4.8GHz, eight efficient cores 1.3-3.6GHz, 20 threads and 24MB cache) that we tested on the Dell XPS 13 Plus.
The 17-inch display of the device has an aspect ratio of 16:10 and a resolution of 2560 × 1600 pixels. LG says its IPS screen can cover at least 95 percent of DCI-P3 and reach 350 nits of brightness.
LG claims a battery life of up to nine hours with an 80Wh battery, but doesn’t reveal how it got there. The port selection, meanwhile, could be worse for a 0.78-inch laptop. There are three USB-A ports, a Thunderbolt 4 port, HDMI 2.1, a 3.5mm jack, a Micro SD card reader, and RJ45 Ethernet.
The new 17-inch computer also includes a feature that is becoming increasingly common in laptops: a webcam and AI software that can detect whether the user is in front of the PC. A 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 looks over their shoulder. In multi-display settings, the computer can also detect which screen you’re looking at and hover over it automatically. Core technology from Mirametrix, and when we tested it on the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro, it showed an eerie always-on webcam, a couple of distracting lights, and sometimes thought someone was behind me when no one was around. Of course, you can disable the Glance feature.
The LG 17U70Q costs $1,600. For those looking for something smaller with more storage and who don’t need a dedicated GPU, LG also released a 16-inch Ultra PC (16U70Q) yesterday. It features an AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor, up to 1TB of memory, 16GB LPDDR4x-4266. dual-channel memory and a 1920×1200 resolution IPS display, priced between $999 and $1299.