System76 Serval Pro vs. Gazelle Pro Linux Laptops

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 31 August 2013 at 03:25 PM EDT. 3 Comments
HARDWARE
For those curious how the performance of System76's high-end Linux laptops have evolved over the past two years, here are some benchmarks comparing the latest Gazelle Professional "Haswell" laptop against the Serval Professional from the Intel "Sandy Bridge" days.

We've had the Gazelle Pro at Phoronix the past few days and have been running a plethora of Linux benchmarks on the high-end Haswell system with Core i7 4900MQ CPU, Intel SSD, and beautiful 1920 x 1080 display. As one of the final tests before having to return the review sample, I was curious how the Gazelle Pro compared to the Serval Pro -- the Ubuntu-friendly hardware vendor's laptop from two years ago when Intel "Sandy Bridge" CPUs were the latest and greatest.

With the Gazelle Pro not working with older Linux distributions, i.e. Ubuntu 10.10/11.04 from the Sandy Bridge days, and no longer having the Serval Pro, it's not a pure hardware comparison as there's Ubuntu 10.10 on the Sandy Bridge laptop and Ubuntu 13.10 on the Haswell laptop. Regardless, this weekend testing should offer an interesting glimpse how the System76 laptop hardware and Ubuntu Linux software performance has evolved over 2~3 years.

Thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite software with integration of OpenBenchmarking.org, it's still easy to pull up the old Serval Professional benchmark results and to carry out new comparative tests against the two year old numbers and to do so in the same exact manner as back then, thanks to the heavy focus of automation and reproducibility by our open-source benchmarking platform.

The results of this System76 Serval Pro vs. Gazelle Pro laptop comparison can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org within 1308312-SO-SYSTEM76279. If you then want to see how your Ubuntu system performs against these two System76 laptops, it's a simple matter of running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1308312-SO-SYSTEM76279.

Embedded below are just a couple of the comparative benchmark results, of the 100+ tests run by the Phoronix Test Suite.
System76 Serval Pro
System76 Serval Pro
System76 Serval Pro
System76 Serval Pro
System76 Serval Pro
System76 Serval Pro
System76 Serval Pro
System76 Serval Pro
There's quite the improvement in Intel PC hardware performance going from Sandy Bridge to Haswell plus the continued improvements to the Ubuntu Linux software stack from optimizations in the Linux kernel to the GCC compiler.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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