LG makes a new play with first gaming laptop

LG is throwing down the gauntlet to consumer tech titans like Dell, Lenovo and Asus with it's first entry in the gaming laptop arena – aiming to stand out from that crowd with a heady mix of premium hardware, sleek design and a focus on performance.

Up until now, the company's UltraGear gaming portfolio has featured monitors and speakers. Model 17G90Q changes that by adding a powerful gaming machine featuring a 17.3-inch Full HD LCD display panel with a 300-Hz refresh rate and 1-ms response time, while supporting 99 percent of the sRGB color space.

Housed within the aluminum chassis is a powerhouse combination of 11th Gen Tiger Lake H processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q GPU supported by up to 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of SSD storage (plus microSD card expansion).

An onboard cooling system that includes a vapor chamber keeps the system from running hot "even when pushed to the limits," and UltraGear Studio software will allow gamers to keep an eye on key system performance indicators, and tweak such things a clock speed, GPU, memory share rate and more in real time. And a 93-Wh battery should be good for a few solid gameplay hours away from a wall socket.

For reliable wireless gaming, Wi-Fi 6E has been included though there is an Ethernet port around back should players prefer to plug in. And being a gaming machine, the UltraGear laptop sports a RGB backlit keyboard where every key can be assigned its own color, and there appears to be under-laptop lighting and an illuminated lid logo too.

LG has been quite generous with physical ports as well – there's one USB 4 Gen 3 Type-C, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, two USB 3.2 Gen 2, and HDMI. There's a quad speaker setup with DTS X Ultra to help players determine which direction sounds are coming from so they can dodge enemy fire, keep track of team mates and so on, or players can plug a pair of headphones into the 4-pole audio out. And finally, video chats with other players can be had courtesy of a 1080p webcam with dual microphones.

There's no word on pricing for the 15.75 x 10.69 x 0.82~0.84-in (400 x 271.6 x 20.9~21.4-mm), 5.82-lb (2.64-kg) 17G90Q UltraGear gaming laptop, but it will initially launch in the US and Korea early next year. More details are expected to be revealed at CES 2022 in January.

Source: LG