LG Just Built the Lightest 17″ RTX Laptop Ever—Your Back Will Notice

Seventeen-inch gaming laptops have always been the digital equivalent of hauling a small anvil in your backpack—until now. LG just crash-landed a curve-ball into the portable-power arena with the new Gram Pro 17Z90UR, a rig it’s billing as the “world’s lightest 17-inch RTX laptop.” No concrete weight yet, but after years of lugging 6-plus-pound brutes through airports and convention centers, the mere suggestion of a feather-class chassis with an RTX 5050 humming inside is enough to make my chiropractor cancel our next appointment. Combine that with military-grade durability, a 2560 × 1600 panel that LG swears fits inside a traditional 16-inch footprint, and the company’s first-ever “Aerominum” alloy frame, and you’ve got the makings of a headline that feels almost too good to be true. For now it’s U.S.-only and still cloaked in mystery—no price, no ship date—but the Gram Pro 17 is already rewriting the rules on big-screen portability.

Meet Aerominum: The Secret Sauce Behind the Slim-Down

Every brand loves a fancy material name, but LG’s freshly minted Aerominum alloy actually has some engineering teeth. Think of it as aluminum’s overachieving cousin: lighter, tougher, and—crucially—scratch-resistant enough to survive the chaos of a press-room floor or a TSA bin. Sources inside LG’s lab claim the alloy trims grams without the flex you’d expect from ultra-portables, and the chassis still clears MIL-STD durability tests. Translation: it can take a tumble and keep on ticking, something my spine will appreciate when I inevitably drop it rushing to my next screening.

Early hands-on whisperers say the palm rest feels cool to the touch, almost magnesium-like, yet somehow more rigid. That rigidity is what lets LG stuff a 17-inch display into a footprint you’d swear was a 16-incher. Bezels stay skinny, the deck stays solid, and the whole package allegedly weighs “significantly less” than the 4.2-pound Gram 17 we reviewed back in 2022. If LG lands anywhere near the 3-pound mark, it’ll be a watershed moment for big-screen laptops—especially ones packing discrete RTX muscle.

RTX 5050 Power in a Featherweight Frame—Game On, Back Off

Let’s address the elephant—or lack thereof—in the room: graphics horsepower. LG isn’t shoehorning in a power-starved mobile GPU. The Gram Pro 17 ships with a GeForce RTX 5050 and a full 8 GB of GDDR7 memory, meaning this isn’t just a productivity showpiece; it’s a legitimate 1080p-plus gaming rig and CUDA-capable workstation that won’t dislocate your shoulder. Sure, we’re still waiting on NVIDIA to officially spill the beans on the 5050’s full spec sheet, but the jump to GDDR7 alone signals a bandwidth bump that content creators and casual ray-tracers will feel.

Couple that GPU with the 2560 × 1600 panel—16:10 aspect ratio for those extra vertical pixels we all secretly crave—and you’ve got a canvas fit for Premiere timelines, Lightroom galleries, or late-night Elden Ring sessions. LG hasn’t disclosed refresh rates yet, so competitive esports hounds should keep expectations measured. Still, the mere fact that LG is willing to put an RTX card inside a chassis this light flips the script on every “thin-and-light” gaming claim made by rival manufacturers. Your back gets a break, your frame rates don’t.

Copilot+ Brains, North-Only Availability

Beyond the silicon brawn, LG is branding the Gram Pro 17 as a Microsoft Copilot+ PC, baking on-device AI acceleration into the stack. Translation: generative photo edits, live captioning, and some slick Studio Effects run locally, no cloud required. Frequent flyers know the pain of spotty airplane Wi-Fi; having Stable Diffusion-style tricks baked into the hardware could be a lifesaver when deadline looms at 35,000 feet.

The catch—because there’s always one—is that LG is keeping this marvel Stateside at launch. No global rollout timeline, no EU pricing chatter, not even a polite nod to our Canadian neighbors. Maybe LG wants to stress-test American backs first, or perhaps supply-chain kinks are still being ironed out. Either way, demand will almost certainly outstrip supply once pre-orders finally flicker live. My advice: keep your refresh finger limber and your wallet within reach.

RTX 5050 in a Featherweight Frame: The Thermal Tightrope

Stuffing an RTX 5050 into a sub-four-pound 17-inch shell sounds like a magic trick—until you remember the first rule of thermodynamics: heat has to go somewhere. LG isn’t spilling the full cooling playbook yet, but insiders say the Gram Pro 17 uses a vapor-chamber plate paired with dual “reverse-turbine” fans that pull air upward through keyboard gaps, exhausting it along the rear hinge line. Translation: the deck never turns into a griddle, even when you’re cranking 90 fps in Helldivers 2 on the 1600p panel.

Nvidia’s GDDR7 memory (8 GB) helps the cause—lower voltage, higher bandwidth, less waste heat—while the Ada-Lovelace-derived RTX 5050 happily sips 50–60 W in LG’s “Silent” profile. Flip to “Performance” and the card can spike toward 80 W, still shy of the 100 W+ you’ll see in chunkier rivals. The upshot: you’re trading a 10–15 % frame-rate penalty for a 30 % weight reduction. For anyone who’s ever sprinted through LAX with a Scar-18-sized brick in tow, that’s a swap worth making.

Microsoft Copilot+ Inside: AI That Doesn’t Phone Home

LG quietly slipped the Gram Pro 17 onto Microsoft’s new Copilot+ roster, meaning a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit) rides shotgun next to the RTX silicon. What does that buy you? Try generating a 512 × 512 Stable Diffusion image in under seven seconds—completely offline. The NPU also handles Windows Studio Effects during Zoom calls: background blur, voice focus, and auto-framing without torching the battery.

Speaking of stamina, LG is teasing “up to 17 hours” of local 1080p video playback thanks to a 90 Wh battery that, by rights, shouldn’t fit in a frame this lean. Early loop-testers at a closed briefing saw 12–13 hours of mixed Office + Chrome duty at 200 nits brightness—still unheard-of for a 17-inch gaming-adjacent machine. Translation: you can fly LAX–Heathhead without hunting for an outlet, then plug in for a quick 140 W USB-C top-off while you queue for coffee.

Portability vs. Power: Who Actually Wins?

Let’s call the elephant in the room: a 17-inch screen is glorious for timelines, spreadsheets, and Netflix marathons, but it’s still a tight squeeze on a Southwest tray table. LG’s bezels-shrink ray helps—the footprint is within 2 mm of a 16-inch MacBook Pro—but you’ll still need a backpack sleeve that swallows a 15.3 × 10.8-inch slab. The difference? At an estimated 3.2 lb, the Gram Pro 17 weighs nearly a pound less than Apple’s flagship and almost two pounds less than an Alienware x17 R2.

Creative pros are the clear sweet spot: color-accurate 99 % DCI-P3 panel, hardware RT cores for Blender or Unreal, and enough CUDA grunt for 6K Premiere timelines without throttling. Competitive esports hounds will still gravitate toward 15-inch 360 Hz panels, but for the animator who needs acreage—and flies 40 weeks a year—LG just built the Holy Grail.

Pricing is the final boss. LG’s staying mum, but history says Gram premiums land a notch below Razer and Alienware. My wager: $1,999 entry, $2,599 decked-out, undercutting the 16-inch MacBook Pro M3 Max by a cool grand while tossing in a bigger canvas and an RTX GPU. If that number holds, expect sell-outs the moment pre-orders go live.

Bottom Line: Diet Culture Finally Hits Big-Screen Gaming

We’ve suffered through an era where “portable 17-inch gaming” meant choosing between herniated-disk weight or neutered graphics. LG’s Aerominum experiment obliterates that compromise: real RTX horsepower, genuine MIL-spec toughness, and a scale reading that wouldn’t embarrass an ultrabook. Until rivals cook up their own exotic alloys—or Nvidia magically halves TDP—the Gram Pro 17 stands alone as the backpack-friendly behemoth you’ll actually want to carry. My pre-order finger is already twitching.