John Ratsey

The same pattern of the 2025 gram Pro on low fan being faster than the 2024 gram Pro on normal fan is also seen on the Passmark benchmark test. Finally, I ran some 3D Mark tests although I don’t normally have a need for 3D graphics. The results follow the trend of the 2025 gram Pro on the low fan setting being faster than the 2024 gram Pro using the normal fan setting. I carried out some battery testing using my normal method of playing an MP4 movie. At 60% display brightness the average power drain over 8 hours was 5.3W. Lowering the brightness to 35% reduced the power drain to 4.4W. Illuminating that big display is what uses the lower. I have little doubt that the computer is capable of spending a working day of normal office usage without needing a power socket. It can’t match, however, the 14” gram where the power drain for the same test is less than 3W but higher CPU usage will have a bigger proportional effect on the latter machine. While talking of power, LG ships the UK models of its notebooks with a power brick which has a separate mains cable which adds a lot to the travel weight. The computer will, however, work off almost USB-C PSU which has a 20V output. It will complain if the PSU rating is less than 65W but this has no adverse effect on performance. If needed, some power will be taken from the battery. The photo below compares the LG 65W PSU with an Anker 65W PSU plus 3m USB-C cable. In conclusion, it appears that my objective of having a notebook similar to my 17” 2024 gram Pro which can match its performance but with less fan noise is satisfied by the 2025 version. Perhaps the Panther Lake 2026 gram Pro will be even better but it might also be more expensive.

For performance testing I started with the old and simple wPrime for which I have results going back many years and which measures the basic CPU performance. The 32M tests, which only last a few seconds on modern hardware, don’t vary much. Two outliers on the 1024M test are the 17Z90T with its poor design of the cooling vents and the 2024 gram Pro on the low fan (and low power) setting. The 2025 gram Pro on low fan isn’t far behind the 14” gram or the 2024 gram Pro running at the normal fan setting. LG seem to have selected a good power value for this low fan setting while there’s marginal performance gain in return for the much greater noise of the high fan setting. The next benchmark to be examined is Cinebench. The older Cinebench 15 tests are completed relatively quickly on newer computers but are representative of short duration tasks. Cinebench 23 keeps running for at least 10 minute and is a better indication of thermal performance limits during longer duration tasks. There’s not much difference in the Cinebench 15 results for the Arrow Lake 14” gram and 17” gram Pro while both are well ahead of the non-Pro gram 17. There’s also not much difference in the single core performance of any of the notebooks in my summary table. In fact, the 14” gram leads the field for this test. I suspect that this is due to the lower power limit keeping the CPU running faster for more time before reaching a thermal limit which triggers a slowdown. In Cinebench 23 the same pattern is noticeable for the single core test but the 17Z90TP is well ahead of the others for the multi-core test. On the low fan setting it’s faster than the 2024 gram Pro at the normal fan setting. The next set of tests is Geekbench 6 where the single core test results are all close together with the 14” Arrow Lake gram being slightly faster than the 17” gram Pro for the same cooling option. The 17” Arrow Lake gram Pro pulls ahead on the multi core tests and also on the graphics tests, perhaps helped by more and faster RAM. This notebook, on the low fan setting is faster than its predecessor at the normal fan setting. More speed with less noise!

It's time to do some testing which is made more complicated because the user-selected fan speed controls the CPU performance in longer tests. LG’s design logic is to specify different power limits in the BIOS according to the cooling mode option selected by the user using either the LG “My gram” app or the Fn+F7 key combination. The system has two power limit values. PL1 is the maximum long duration power which can be supplied to the CPU and PL2 is the short duration power limit. HWiNFO reports this information for the Intel 255H CPU: Those are the static (ie base value) power limits which LG designers considered appropriate for the notebook’s thermal performance. There are also dynamic power limits which change according to the cooling mode and can be seen using HWiNFO’s sensor data. I have summarised these and compared them with the corresponding values for some other LG notebooks. I have ignored the AI cooling mode because one initial test showed slower than the low fan setting. Perhaps it measures the ambient noise. It can be seen that LG have given the 2025 gram Pro higher PL1 values than both its predecessor and the other 2025 models with the same CPU. The difference on the low fan setting is substantial. More power should enable higher performance until the CPU reaches the maximum allowable temperature of 105°C.

First an explanatory note about model numbers. LG has used a fairly consistent system for model numbers which is used here for brevity. The model being reviewed is 17Z90TP. The 17 is for screen size, Z seems to be Intel clamshell (but so is U, while T is two-in-one), I haven’t figured out 90, T is the model year 2025 or perhaps the hardware generation as LG also released some RU models in 2025 with 2023 Intel hardware, the P is an optional extra letter which indicates the Pro versions (some 2025 models also have L versions with Lunar Lake chips). My 2024 gram Pro is model 17Z90SP. I already owned the 2024 17” gram Pro (and before that the 2022 17” gram). The notebook normally serves as a compact desktop computer. I like the 17” screen size without the bulk of most 17” notebooks (usually gaming machines) but with the capacity to hold two SSDs. LG’s 17” IPS panel is very good quality. The main limitation of LG’s slim format is the cooling system. This was partly addressed by the introduction of two fans in the 2024 gram Pro which had a noticeable performance improvement compared to the 2022 model, but two fans can make more noise than one. In December 2025 I bought the 14” LG 14Z90T and was impressed that it could perform as well as my 2024 17Z90SP despite the latter’s two fans (see this mini review). I like my notebooks to be both efficient and quiet and I therefore tried the 2025 17” gram (17Z90T) which had the same internal hardware (except for 32GB RAM instead of 16GB) as the 14” but discovered that it under-performed (see my comments here). It was returned for a refund. Since then I’ve been watching out for a 32GB version of the Pro model (ie two fans) of the 2025 17” gram at a reasonable price and found one which had been returned to Amazon UK. I quickly discovered that this 17Z90TP performed more in line with my expectations. This notebook is model 17Z90TP-G.AD88A1 which has the Arrow Lake Intel® Core™ Ultra7 255H CPU, Intel® Arc™ graphics, 32GB of 8,400MHz RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 17” WQXGA (2560 x 1600) IPS display. The weight, according to my digital scales, is 1.326kg which is slightly lower than the advertised 1.369kg but more than the 1.277kg that I measured for the 2024 gram Pro. I won’t go into all the details as much is the same as the 2024 model. My interest is in the performance difference. Externally the gram 17Z90TP looks the same as the 17Z90SP. There are different stickers on the palm rest and the right Ctrl key on the keyboard has been replaced by a Copilot key. The display is the same top quality matte LG IPS panel. I could see that, unlike on the non-Pro gram 17, the vent holes in the bottom matched the fans: Getting the bottom off the gram Pro is relatively easy: Remove the four rubber feet, remove four screws and then carefully prise off the base (the non-Pro gram 17 uses a different design with more screws). Internally there is the same overall layout. The fans look different but have similar size and the heat sink in the newer gram also covers the memory chips which are rated at 8.4GHz. The 90Whr battery in the newer gram Pro is the same physical size as the older 77Whr battery. Above is the 2025 gram Pro, below is the 2024 gram Pro. The 90Whr battery was an unexpected bonus as the LG UK specs, replicated by the retailers, say 77Whr. The LG global specs for this model might be the cause of the confusion as they show 77Whr in the summary and 90Whr in the detailed specs. It seems that no one checked. 90Whr, however, is standard for the version of the 17“ gram Pro with the Nvidia GPU.

Notebook check has posted a review of the 15.6" 15U55T. The reviewer has commented on the relatively low fan noise but I can't see any comment suggesting that they tried the different cooling mode options which would affect the performance.

Yes, the fans in my 2025 17" gram Pro look like those. I'm also wondering how much the air flow is restricted by the small gap (about 3mm at the back) between the bottom of the notebook and the surface that it is resting on. I've got some 5mm thick rubber pads waiting to be fitted at the back of the new machine. I don't have the dual speakers.

I'll put an internal photo with the fans in my mini-review. I use HWiNFO to see a lot of performance data (below is an extract from the long list of values). The PL1 dynamic value changes immediately when I change the fan speed (note that I have not investigated the BIOS settings or installed any other power management tools. What I would like is a slightly lower normal fan speed setting with correspondingly lower power limit but I've not seen any option for fine-tuning fan speed in the advanced BIOS when previously looking at the options.

My 2025 gram 17 Pro (model 17Z90TP-G.AD88A1) won't be going back. It is altogether a much better thermally designed version of the gram 17 than the non-Pro machine which was a disappointment (see my post here) to the extent that I wonder if LG deliberately crippled it in order to encourage people to buy the more expensive version. I also discovered that this model has the 90Whr battery in spite of most specs saying it has a 77Whr battery. The original source of this mininformation is probably this LG global listing which states 77Whr in the summary spec but shows 90Whr in the detailed specs. I will start by providing this table showing the design power limits which programmed into the BIOS (I didn't realise the significance of this information until after I had sent the 17Z90T back so I've only got the power limits for the normal fan setting for that machine). The power limits reflect the designers' estimates of the heat disssipation of a notebook's cooling system for a particular maximum fan speed. However, it seems that some designers have done a better job than others as the 14Z90T out-performs the 17Z90T despite having lower power limits. The difference in the power limits between the 2024 gram Pro (17Z90SP) and the 2025 gram Pro (17Z90TP) is noticeable. The fans look better in the newer model. However, subjectively, I also feel that the newer model is also noisier on the normal and high fan settings although using my phone as a sound meter doesn't reveal a significant difference in sound volume. I think the newer model's fan noise is higher frequency. Where the 17Z90TP really scores, however, is the performance at the low fan setting where overall performance is similar to the 17Z90SP at the normal fan setting and the low fan is barely audible so I'm planning to forego some performance in favour of having a quieter computer. That performance hit depends on what is happening. The difference in the Passmark score is minimal while it's big for the Cinebench 23 multi-core test. Once I've sorted out my test results I'm going to put the details in a separate mini-review thread for the 2025 gram 17 Pro.

I've just pressed the buy button on a returned Gram 17 Pro at Amazon UK which was almost 25% off the current inflated price and slightly below the brand new price of two months ago. There was an even cheaper returned model a few weeks ago but I was away on holiday. I will be checking if this two fan gram 17 can match the performance and quietness of my gram 14 with the same 255H CPU. The single fan gram 17 failed this test and was returned to LG (a slow process but I got my money back).

I didn't notice a significant difference in display quality between the IPS panel on my 17" 2024 gram Pro and the 15.5" OLED panel on the LG gram Superslim. I will be watching the prices of the Panther Lake models with interest. I feel that notebook manufacturers will have to absorb part of the higher RAM cost if they want to sell the 2026 products. For most users the improvements offered by the new models aren't sufficient to pay a big price premium.

You have been very adventurous with your changing of the advanced BIOS setting than I would consider doing. Amazon UK has followed LG UK with big price increases on the 2025 models but I'm waiting to see if one which is returned is offered at a tempting discount.

Regarding your original starting question for this thread about the LG My gram software, I've not yet noticed any significant difference in power usage when My gram's battery saving mode is enabled. There would need to be long tests under controlled conditions to see if there is any overall difference and also figure out whether LG has done more than is offered by the standard Windows power options. I get the impression that the Intel Arrow Lake / Lunar Lake package (with some parts made by TSMC) provides a welcome improvement in power efficiency under light usage conditions. Overall, I'm not impressed by the user interface of the My gram software which brings all the LG controls into one place.

This is something I would like to be able to do if I change computer. Do you have any software with a single licence which needed to be transferred? If so, did you release the licence before moving the SSD and then reapply? The need to do this probably depends on what hardware fingerprint the licence system uses. How much fan noise are you getting at 40W? I want good performance with minimal noise. LG refunded my money for the Arrow Lake gram 17 (not Pro version) and I'm wondering what to do next. (i) Get the gram 17 Pro if the price is right; or (ii) get the Nvidia version which is known to have a better cooling system (but this is likely to have a substantial price premium); or (iii) get another non-Pro gram 17 if at a good price and modify the air vents for the fan plus the power limits; or (iv) wait for the Panther Lake models to first appear and then be discounted. LG seem to have had some muddled thinking while configuring for both Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake. I'm currently away from home at the moment so thinking and watching the prices.

This is the 14" gram so no room for two fans. The dynamic power limits are changed in response to the chosen fan noise setting. I'm a little puzzled why it showed 23W for the PL1 dynamic limit when I captured that dature because it's currently showing only 12W for the normal fan setting and 28W for the high fan setting.

As noted elsewhere, I have been impressed by the overall performance and power efficiency of my Arrow Lake gram 14 and was therefore disappointed by the 17" version of what should be the same hardware couldn't match the performance while making more fan noise. The gram 14T's power limits for the normal fan setting are shown below. These aren't changed when using the battery.