LG's First Gaming Laptop Is A Powerhouse With A Fast Display, 11th Gen CPU And RTX 3080

LG offers some sleek and powerful laptop models, but none that it would consider a true gaming laptop. Until now, that is—LG on Monday added a notebook model to its UltraGear family (model 17G90Q) and has dubbed it the company's "first gaming laptop." And like its nimble Gram laptops, it sports a "seriously sleek design."

It's almost as if LG asked me what I personally would want from a gaming laptop, because my answer would be a relatively thin and light design with a fast 17.3-inch display and capable hardware. The 17.3-inch form factor is not as popular today as it had been in the past, but LG clearly feels there is an audience (presumably beyond just myself).

Let's talk weight and dimensions before we get to the hardware. This svelte beauty measures just 0.82-0.84 inches thin and weighs 5.82 pounds. Not bad at all for a 17.3-inch laptop, particularly one geared towards gaming.

The display is an IPS panel with a 1920x1080 resolution and 300Hz refresh rate. I wouldn't have minded a higher res at that size (like 1440p), but the fast refresh rate clearly indicates this is meant for competitive gaming. LG also says it offers 99 percent coverage of the sRGB color space, so speed shouldn't come at the expense of image quality.

LG intends to offer the laptop with a range of Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake-H processors, though it has not yet specified which exact SKUs. Those are powerful mobile CPUs, though, and they're paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q GPU, 16GB or 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and up to 1TB of NVMe SSD storage (there are dual M.2 slots).

Given the thin and light design, I imagine the GPU falls on the lower end of the power spectrum, though it's still a powerful chip with 6,144 CUDA cores and 8GB or 16GB of GDDR6 (LG hasn't specified which) tied to a 256-bit memory bus.

The port selection consists of USB 4 Gen 3x2 Type-C with Thunderbolt 4, USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 Type-C, two USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 Type-A, HDMI, and an Ethernet port. Users will also find a microSD card slot, Killer Wi-Fi 6E, a 1080p webcam with dual mics, a fingerprint reader, and a few other odds and ends.

No pricing information is available yet, though LG did say its UltraGear gaming laptop will be available early next year.