LG UltraGear 17G90Q

LG is the latest manufacturer without a gaming pedigree to leap into the market for laptops specifically designed for gamers, joining the likes of Acer, Lenovo and others. The company has just announced the UltraGear 17G690Q, its first gaming laptop and one that is designed based off its highly regarded Gram line of portable PCs.

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The announcement comes a couple of weeks before the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where the 17G90Q will presumably be on display. LG gave itself a challenge to try to squeeze larger, hotter components into the super-svelte Gram chassis, one that's even trickier as the 17G90G is built around a massive 17.3-inch display. LG had already refined its sleek design on the Gram 17, which manages in its latest iteration to weigh just under 3 pounds and measure just 0.70 inches thick.

One reason the Gram 17 could stay relatively petite was that it relied on Intel's integrated graphics rather than offering a discrete card. That's a no-go for any gaming system, however, so the addition of the high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q GPU provides the UltraGear 17G690Q with its gaming power, but also extra heft. That includes the vapor cooling system that LG had to install inside the laptop to handle the heat from the graphics card, not to mention the larger 93Wh battery to provide more portable power. The result is that the 17G90Q balloons to 5.8 pounds, while its dimensions expand to 0.84 inches thick.

While that's certainly bulkier than most laptops, it's also slightly lighter than an equivalently sized Razer Blade and over a pound lighter than Alienware's x17 R1 system. Nonetheless, it still offers other top-end components to complement the GeForce RTX 3080, such as an 11th-generation Intel Core Tiger Lake H processor, either 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of solid-state storage with a dual-drive design.

The UltraGear 17G90Q includes many of the other expected features of today's gaming laptops, such as Intel's Killer Wireless technology, 1ms response time and 300MHz refresh rate from its full HD screen, and a keyboard that gives you per-key control of backlight color. It also includes some of the niceties for everyday laptop use, such as a full HD webcam, fingerprint reader on the power button, and an array of ports including a USB Type C connection with Thunderbolt 4 and USB4 support, HDMI output, Ethernet port, and a microSD card reader.

Although LG has provided plenty of information on the Ultragear 17G90Q already, some important missing information -- such as the exact Intel processor included and pricing information -- could become available when CES kicks off the first week of January.