System76 Thelio Major Powered By AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series Performance

When looking at the peak CPU frequency being achieved across the duration of 56 benchmarks initially run on these three workstations with Pop!_OS Linux, the System76 Thelio had a small advantage over the DIY build of the Threadripper 7980X: on average hitting 4.4GHz with the new System76 Thelio compared to 4.2GHz with the ASUS-based system build. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X has a stated maximum boost clock of 5.1GHz but under Linux both of the 7980X systems were reporting top frequencies in the 5.3~5.6GHz range as possible reporting issues with the AMD P-State CPUFreq driver or similar -- potentially related to the maximum possible CPU frequency bug I mentioned at the beginning of the article.

Both systems had a comparable CPU power consumption of around 304 Watts on average and a maximum peak in the 380 Watt range. The default TDP of the Threadripper 7980X is 350 Watts. Compared to the four year old Threadripper 3990X, the new platforms were consuming around 19% more power but as shown the performance improvements were often much greater.

All three systems when under the hours of constant benchmarking were having CPU core temperatures in the mid 60s. At idle the System76 Thelio was extremely quiet while under full load there was an audible difference in the fan noise but nothing overly obnoxious nor comparable to much noisier HPC server platforms and the like. It's still very much possible to keep such a powerful workstation under your desk and the noise level was similar to that of the HP Z6 G5 A Threadripper PRO workstation.

The tests in this article were CPU/system focused and not GPU-focused due to the different graphics cards between platforms. But some follow-up tests will be looking at the Radeon PRO W7900 performance.

With previously not having reviewed any Crucial T700 drives, I was curious how the 1TB Crucial T700 CT1000T700SSD5 was performing thermal-wise given my experience with other PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives. The System76 Thelio kept the NVMe SSD cool with an average temperature of 42 degrees and a peak of 50 degrees.

When taking the geometric mean of all the 56 performance benchmarks carried out for today's launch-day testing, the System76 Thelio came out slightly faster than the DIY build of the Threadripper 7980X. In some areas the System76 Thelio performed better than the ASUS DIY build while in other cases the faster memory on that build based on AMD's Threadripper review kit was of benefit. One of my few suggestions for making the new Thelio even better would be allowing DDR5-5200+ memory options to which System76 is aware.

For those upgrading their workstations on a 3~5 year cycle, it was very interesting to see the vast performance improvement from the four year old Threadripper 3990X System76 Thelio workstation to now with the new System76 Thelio powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X. There was 2.29x the performance with the new System76 Thelio while the CPU power consumption only increased by 19%.

The new System76 Thelio Major powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series offers incredible performance potential. Over the four year old model powered by the Zen 2 Threadrippers, at the same core/thread count the new version delivered more than twice the performance for a small increase in power use across the wide range of code compilation, creator / rendering, AI, and other HPC workloads tested thus far. Across my AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X (and 7970X and Threadripper PRO 7995WX) testing since November, the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper (PRO) 7000 series processors are working out very well under Linux. There hasn't been any troubles besides the minor maximum CPU frequency bug noted and a fix coming there for those concerned about that. The Pop!_OS 22.04 installation shipped with the System76 Thelio Major has been working out well and I continue to enjoy that System76 continues shipping new kernel versions to Pop!_OS users rather than sticking to the static kernel versions as done with upstream Ubuntu Linux.

In addition to the great performance of the new Thelio Major, the refinements by System76 to their original case design over the past few years are nice. The top I/O ports are a welcome addition, improved side airflow vents, replaceable motherboard I/O panel, and more are all great with this open-source hardware chassis design that is manufactured in-house by their facility in Colorado.

Pricing on the new System76 Thelio Major starts out at $4699 USD for the base model with the 24-core Threadripper 7960X and 64GB of RAM. The Threadripper 7970X is an additional $1425 USD or +$4949 for the flagship Threadripper 7980X. For a configuration with the Threadripper 7980X, 1TB of NVMe storage, Radeon RX 7600 graphics, and 128GB of DDR5-4800 ECC memory is about $9947 USD. That pricing is very fair (mind you the list price on the Threadripper 7980X retail is $4999 USD) and comparable to similarly-configured Threadripper 7980X systems from other vendors albeit not Linux-focused IHVs and some of the system designs going wild on the RGB lighting...

Thanks to System76 for sending over the new Thelio Major for testing at Phoronix. Follow-up articles will be looking at more areas of the exciting Ryzen Threadripper class performance, how well the Thelio Major is performing with other Linux distribution options, etc. For those wanting to build a high-end Linux workstation, the Thelio Major is a very wonderful leader. Those interested in learning more can do so via System76.com.