LG gram 14 14Z90T mini review

[John Ratsey]

I commented in my mini-review of the 14Z90RU that I needed to find a reason to buy the 14Z90T in order to compare the two models. Conveniently, a family member's 12 year old Samsung notebook was finally falling apart which provided an opportunity to pass along one of my notebooks so I ordered the 14Z90T from Amazon. It was an ex-return which hadn't had much use.

 

My 14Z90T came in a fairly plain brown box which contrasts with the premium-looking black box of the 14Z90RU.

 

My first finding was that the 14Z90T was, indeed, heavier than the 14Z90R. At 1.12kg it is what the specifications claimed. Why is it heavier? i don't know all the reasons but the bottom of the 14Z90T weighs 109 grams vs 64 grams for the 14Z90RU. The lighter part is a silver colour inside, a 2025-02-26 date stamp and is marked "Material>Mg".  The heavier part is dated 2025-02-22 (the notebook manufacturing date was 2025-03-17) but without other information. It has a black finish on the inside. Why paint it - for better absorption of heat radiated from the electronics? Is it magnesium? Another difference is T has a long bar on the outside instead of the two back feet (14Z90T on left, 14Z90RU on right). 

My 2024 gram Pro also has the long bar. Is it to reduce recirculation of the hot air that is blown out of the backs of the notebooks?

 

I also wondered if the 14Z90T had two fans, which would explain the extra weight. No, it's only got one fan but it is slightly larger than that in the 14Z90RU. The T has the expected two SSD slots but the slot nearest the CPU is marked SSD2. I can see no difference in the performance. Perhaps that slot is deemed secondary because it's nearer the CPU and likely to get hotter. 

The supplied SSD is the same model of 512GB Phison SSD as in the RU. Performance is good but not class-leading:

 

The keyboard has the Copilot key where the right Ctrl key belongs. There's also a squiggle on the left end of the space bar. I haven't yet discovered the meaning of this. The T model has the infra-red camera for login.

[John Ratsey]

More observations:

The 14Z90T comes with LG software called "My gram" instead of the LG Smart Assistant on the 14Z90RU or my 2024 Gram Pro. "My gram" is a step or two backwards in terms of providing easy user access to features such as fan settings and battery management (Fn+F7 also steps through the fan settings). The home page of "My Gram" is dominated by some coloured graphics which look as they have escaped from some childrens' game while the text on the PC maintenance pages isn't friendly to anyone with aging eyes. I thought the folder for LG Smart Assistant was bloated as it takes up about 1/2GB but "My gram" is nearly double that!

I have to admit. however, that I hadn't tried the LG gram Link software until I was setting up the 14Z90T. I've now realised that it is an easy way of moving files between phone and computer.

 

Both the 14Z90T and the 14Z90RU have the same good 1920 x 1200 LGD06EC display. The 14Z90T doesn't have a micro-SD card reader, the RU does.

 

Another subtle difference between the two models is that the T has a smaller dent at the front of the chassis which makes opening the display more difficult than the RU with its bigger dent. Perhaps 2026 will reveal which is LG's preference going forwards.

 

It's time to look at the basic hardware. For some reason, the 14Z90T has the Intel AX211 WiFi / Bluetooth chip instead of the newer BE201 chip. Not that most users have a desparate need for whatever extra the newer chip offers. In other respects it's an Arrow Lake machine with the Intel Ultra 7 255H CPU. This raises the question of why did LG put the 28W CPU into the smallest of the 2025 gram family instead of the lower-rated Lunar Lake CPU? Was availability a factor? The CPU is supported by 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM which is both faster than the DDR4 RAM in the 14Z90RU but also the DDR5 RAM in my gram 17 Pro.

 

[RS4]

Removing the Micro SD card slot is a blatant anti-consumer move from LG, there is more than enough space for that.

[John Ratsey]

19 hours ago, RS4 said:

Removing the Micro SD card slot is a blatant anti-consumer move from LG, there is more than enough space for that.

I agree that there is room internally and externally. Perhaps LG think that users no longer use micro SD cards. I now rarely use a digital camera as the phone has taken over as the primary photography device and the phone has plenty of internal storage from where images can be moved using either a cable or LG gram Link. Nonetheless, there's the apparent inconsistency that the cheaper of the 14" grams made in 2025 has the slot and the more expensive gram doesn't. Perhaps the older Intel CPUs were sufficiently cheap that LG decided to include other features to help sell the notebooks with them in.

[John Ratsey]

And now to the big question. How is the performance of the 14Z90T with the Arrow Lake CPU? I used Cinebench as I have results for four recent gram notebooks. Cinebench 23 runs the tests for a minimum of 10 minutes which reveals how well heat management affects the performance.The highest scores indicate a cooler CPU and/or better cooling.

It can be seen that the 14Z90T is the fastest of the four notebooks for single core applications, although the difference between all four isn't large. For multi-core loads the 14Z90T is also the leader when the "normal" fan setting is used and there's a close call with this notebook and the dual fan 17Z90SP when the "high" fan setting is used. I also noticed that the14Z90T's fan noise is less than those in the 17Z90SP. I would presume that putting the Arrow Lake CPU into a dual fan chassis would enable even higher multi-core performance. I also think that the Cinebench Open GL test is a rough indicator of the GPU performance where the 255H CPU scores almost double the 155H part.

 

The other performance indicator of interest to me is how quickly the 255H CPU eats the battery. I used my standard test of playing an MP4 video. That CPU is very frugal:

Using 17% of the battery in 6 hours represents a potential run time of over 30 hours! It's not obvious on the graph but the first 3 hours were at about 70% display brightness which I then increased to 80%. In comparison, an 8 hour test on the 14Z90RU used 35% of the battery which gives a run time in excess of 20 hours. Roughly, the 255H CPU uses 2/3rd of the power of the 1334U under light load conditions.