System76 Bonobo Professional

Back in March we reviewed the System76 Serval Professional Notebook and found it to be an excellent contender at the time. This notebook, which shipped with Ubuntu 8.10, had packed an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor with a GeForce 9800M GTS graphics card and other great hardware, but since then System76 has rolled out notebooks with newer and better hardware. One of the new notebooks to recently leave the System76 facilities is the Bonobo Professional, which packs an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000 processor and an impressive NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M discrete graphics processor. In this article today we are seeing how this high-end notebook performs with Ubuntu 9.04.

The System76 Bonobo Professional starts out at $1,769 USD and can go all the way up to $4,754 if factoring in the highest-end hardware available through System76 and backing it with a three-year warranty and three years worth of technical support. The graphics options for the Bonobo Professional are either a GeForce GTX 280M with 1GB of GDDR3 memory or a Quadro FX 2700M with 512MB of GDDR3, ours was equipped with the consumer-grade GeForce GTX 280M. The processor options for this notebook range from an Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 to a Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9300. The notebook we were testing out was equipped with the Core 2 Quad Q9000 that is clocked at 2.00 GHz.

System memory options on this high-end notebook range from 2GB to 8GB DDR3 capacities with ours sitting right in the middle with 4GB of RAM. Lastly, the storage options range from 250GB to 500GB for Serial ATA 2.0 HDDs or also available are Intel X25 SSDs. All Bonobo Professional notebooks are equipped with an Intel 5300 WiFi adapter, Bluetooth, a 17" WUXGA glossy LCD with a native resolution of 1920 x 1200, and the stock option is a one year limited warranty with one year of technical support.