LG on Tuesday announced the LG Ultra PC 17″ (17U70Q), which offers a large screen and RTX 3050 Ti mobile graphics card in a 0.78-inch thick laptop. LG’s announcement described it as a “mobile workstation” that is consistent with the style of LG’s Gram series of ultraportable laptops, however there are more powerful competitors out there.
LG has announced a configuration for the 17U70Q that has 512GB of storage. The laptop is said to have an NVMe PCIe 4.0 slot and an older, slower NVMe PCIe 3.0 slot. More storage would help the device compete better with other thin workstation-like clamshells like the Dell XPS 15 9520. We asked LG if the device is user upgradeable and will update this part if we get feedback.
Like the XPS 15, the Ultra PC 17″ features an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics card with 4 GB GDDR6 and 16 GB DDR5-4800 dual-channel RAM.
There is also an Intel Core i7-1260P in LG’s 17-inch PC. We’ve seen this CPU in recently reviewed ultralights without dedicated graphics cards, including the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga. The chip has four performance cores (2.1-4.7 GHz), eight efficient cores (1.5-3.4 GHz), 16 threads and 18 MB cache. In terms of specs, the i7-1260P isn’t as powerful as Intel’s H-series chips 12 1.8-4.8GHz, eight efficient cores at 1.3-3.6GHz, 20 threads and 24MB cache) that we tested in the Dell XPS 13 Plus.
The machine’s 17-inch display has an aspect ratio of 16:10 with 2560 × 1600 pixels. According to LG, its IPS screen can cover at least 95 percent of DCI-P3 and reach a brightness of 350 nits.
LG claims up to nine hours of battery life with the device’s 80Wh battery, but didn’t reveal how it reached that number. Port selection 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 RJ45 Ethernet.
The new 17-inch device also packs a feature that’s becoming 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 when the user is no longer within 13 to 29 inches of the camera and blurs the screen when someone is looking over their shoulder. With multi-display setups, the computer can also detect which screen you’re looking at and automatically bring your cursor there. The underlying technology 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 distracting pair of lights, and it occasionally thought someone was behind me when nobody was there. Of course you can disable the Glance feature.
LG’s 17U70Q costs $1,600. For those looking for something smaller with more memory and who don’t need a dedicated GPU, LG also released the Ultra PC 16″ (16U70Q) yesterday. It features an AMD Ryzen 7 5825U, up to 1TB of memory, 16GB LPDDR4x-4266 Dual-channel memory and a 1920×1200 IPS display for $999-$1,299.
