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

LG announced one 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 better compete with other thin workstation-esque clamshells, like the Dell XPS 15 9520. We asked LG if the machine is user-upgradeable and will update this piece if we hear back.

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

LG's 17-inch PC also has an Intel Core i7-1260P. We've seen this CPU in recently tested ultralights lacking 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, plus 18 MB of cache. Specs-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 found 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 24MB of cache) we tested in the Dell XPS 13 Plus.

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The 17-inch display on the machine has a 16:10 aspect ratio with 2560×1600 pixels. LG says its IPS screen can cover at least 95 percent of DCI-P3 and hit 350 nits' brightness.

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

The new 17-inch machine also includes a feature 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, will lock the computer if the user is no longer within 13–29 inches of the camera and blur the screen if someone is peeking over their shoulder. For multi-display setups, the computer can also tell which screen you're looking at and automatically bring your cursor there. The underlying technology is 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 no one was. Of course, you can opt to disable the Glance feature.

LG's 17U70Q is $1,600. For those seeking something smaller with more storage and who don't need a dedicated GPU, LG also released the Ultra PC 16" (16U70Q) yesterday. It has an AMD Ryzen 7 5825U, up to 1TB of storage, 16GB of LPDDR4x-4266 dual-channel memory, and a 1920×1200 IPS display for $999–$1,299.