System76 Thelio Major Powered By AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series

[phoronix]

Phoronix: System76 Thelio Major Powered By AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series

For those in the market for a high-end Linux workstation for carrying out a lot of code compilation, AI workloads, or other creator or HPC tasks, the new System76 Thelio Major goes on sale today and it's a real winner. I've been trying out the new System76 Thelio Major powered by the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7900 series processors and it delivers excellent Linux performance and all comes nicely working out-of-the-box with their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/system76-thelio-threadripper-2024

[schmidtbag]

The 3990X was not a slow CPU but wow does it look terrible compared to the 7980X.

[rmfx]

This case and build are so clean.
When I think my company pays for crappy HP low end build quality for the same price, just because for the old farts at the top, HP is a "famous" brand they already know...

[stormcrow]

Definitely not a fan of top facing IO ports. They'll collect dust and seemingly magically attract random small contaminants*.

*even if one doesn't eat around a computer case, it's amazing how upward facing holes seem to magically collect crumbs to foul up electrical contacts - even worse if someone on the team smokes (regardless of WHAT they smoke and how they do it - vaping doesn't magically alleviate one of the consequences of chemistry) because the tar and other burnt and aerosol residue collects on anything, exposed or not

[sobrus]

The 3990X was not a slow CPU but wow does it look terrible compared to the 7980X.

Agreed, but once again the set of benchmarks generally favours AVX-512 CPUs here. That makes newer CPUs look better even though real life performance is not that much better.

For me, from all benchmarks performed, only code compilation, video encoding and 7zip are relevant. Most of the rest is already in GPU domain.

That said even in general purpose computing, the gains are pretty big!

This shouldn't be a surprise though - just like in case of ordinary 16-core ryzen, new parts have much higher TDP despite newer manufacturing process, so probably clocks much higher.

[stormcrow]

This case and build are so clean.
When I think my company pays for crappy HP low end build quality for the same price, just because for the old farts at the top, HP is a "famous" brand they already know...

People are still conflating HP & HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise - no longer the same company since 2015) which doesn't help. HPE is the higher end business/enterprise/corporate oriented part that spun off when HP did an amoeba-like split in 2015ish. HPE has the "good stuff" while HP is largely stuck with the low end (and arguably increasingly low quality - to judge by how often a friend of mine has had to have a gifted Omen laptop warranty replaced because of repeated hinge failures) client systems and the increasingly infamous printer ink mafia division. I have two HP business Elitebook line laptops pre-2015 but even they exhibit firmware bugs, one related to ACPI tables, the other with identifying certain RAM modules, even those certified by HP to work. HP just isn't the company from the 90s and earlier where you could "Drop an HP workstation from the roof and it'll still run". Thank you Carly Fiorina. Not.

[sophisticles]

This is a bit misleading:

This System76 Thelio Major review sample was configured with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X 64-core processor, 4 x 32GB DDR5 Micron MTC20F1045S1RC48BA2 DIMMs, 1TB Crucial T700 CT1000T700SSD5 NVMe SSD, and AMD Radeon PRO W7900 graphics.

At the end it says:

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

.

The closing paragraph leads one to think that the system tested comes in at just under $10,000, but it doesn't.

If one goes to their website and configures the same system described at the beginning, it comes in at $15,346 and there is a pop up at the top of the page that says financing is not available for any system over $10,000.

They are charging an additional $5399 for the Radeon Pro W7900, a card that can be had for under $4000:

https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-major-r5-n3/configure

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1765536-REG/amd_100_300000074_radeon_pro_w7900_graphic.html

To me, this is a system that you buy when someone else is footing the bill and doesn't really know what they are doing.

[stormcrow]

This is a bit misleading:



At the end it says:

.

The closing paragraph leads one to think that the system tested comes in at just under $10,000, but it doesn't.

If one goes to their website and configures the same system described at the beginning, it comes in at $15,346 and there is a pop up at the top of the page that says financing is not available for any system over $10,000.

They are charging an additional $5399 for the Radeon Pro W7900, a card that can be had for under $4000:

https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-major-r5-n3/configure

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1765536-REG/amd_100_300000074_radeon_pro_w7900_graphic.html

To me, this is a system that you buy when someone else is footing the bill and doesn't really know what they are doing.

If you've never worked in businesses like this, the money goes towards the salaries of the people that assemble the hardware and take the time to QC it for you. Some businesses find this to be an adequate trade off especially when the salaries of their skilled personnel is figured in, some don't. If you're paying someone pushing 200k+ a year to do what they do, you don't want to pay them to do what they can pay the OEM less for. Obviously, that doesn't alleviate the need for the high-skilled individual to do their due diligence in verifying the setup with the software they have to use, but at least that's part of their job description while running low skilled QC for 36+ hours on new hardware isn't. Even IT teams often don't have the time to do this kind of thing any longer because they're often overworked and underpaid. Time is always money.

Edit to add: What you also seem to fail to realize is that the OEM of the video card has made the same calculation. They have to pay not only for the physical materials to build the card, but the factory line workers, the engineers that designed the board layout and firmware, the programmers that tweak and ostensibly verify AMD's (or Nvidia's) reference driver code for their version of the finished product, the packaging, and the support contractor they hire to manage any hardware support they have to deal with. But in System76's case because they're system integrators, it's likely there's a more direct line past the cheap contracted scripted tech support to the higher tiers of support personnel, or in extreme cases up to the engineering teams - access no individual/consumer will have.

[skeevy420]

This is a bit misleading:



At the end it says:

.

The closing paragraph leads one to think that the system tested comes in at just under $10,000, but it doesn't.

If one goes to their website and configures the same system described at the beginning, it comes in at $15,346 and there is a pop up at the top of the page that says financing is not available for any system over $10,000.

They are charging an additional $5399 for the Radeon Pro W7900, a card that can be had for under $4000:

https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-major-r5-n3/configure

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1765536-REG/amd_100_300000074_radeon_pro_w7900_graphic.html

To me, this is a system that you buy when someone else is footing the bill and doesn't really know what they are doing.

Using that GPUs pricing, they're charging a 35% of the cost installation fee. It seems bad, but it's rather generous if you compare it to what a tradesman will charge you. While it varies, I normally start at 50% installation fee and it usually ends up around 100-200%. System76 are a bunch generous socialists compared to me.

FWIW, I'm normally one of the System76 charges too much people. While I still think their cases outta do a lot more for what they cost, System76 as a whole does charge a fair price when you factor in that they're a small business in America and when you compare their markup to their big business competitors.

[sophisticles]

If you've never worked in businesses like this, the money goes towards the salaries of the people that assemble the hardware and take the time to QC it for you. Some businesses find this to be an adequate trade off especially when the salaries of their skilled personnel is figured in, some don't. If you're paying someone pushing 200k+ a year to do what they do, you don't want to pay them to do what they can pay the OEM less for. Obviously, that doesn't alleviate the need for the high-skilled individual to do their due diligence in verifying the setup with the software they have to use, but at least that's part of their job description while running low skilled QC for 36+ hours on new hardware isn't. Even IT teams often don't have the time to do this kind of thing any longer because they're often overworked and underpaid. Time is always money.

Edit to add: What you also seem to fail to realize is that the OEM of the video card has made the same calculation. They have to pay not only for the physical materials to build the card, but the factory line workers, the engineers that designed the board layout and firmware, the programmers that tweak and ostensibly verify AMD's (or Nvidia's) reference driver code for their version of the finished product, the packaging, and the support contractor they hire to manage any hardware support they have to deal with. But in System76's case because they're system integrators, it's likely there's a more direct line past the cheap contracted scripted tech support to the higher tiers of support personnel, or in extreme cases up to the engineering teams - access no individual/consumer will have.

So long story short, you have no problem paying $1400 more than MSRP for a graphics card?

You have no problem paying $15,000 to run free software?

You also have no problem paying that much for sub-optimal hardware for this task?

Is this only when someone else is footing the bill and you don't have to account for the expenditure in your budget or does it also apply when it's coming out of your pocket?

I worked as a manager with a budget in the millions and i didn't believe in spending money like it was going out of style.

Some of the other department managers had the attitude "what do you care, it's not your money" or "it's the cost of doing business".

This type of reckless spending led to hundreds of us, including department managers and directors, losing our jobs in 2021 when the company decided restructure in order to cut expenditures only to have history repeat itself in the new company i landed in 2023 where managers, directors, the CEO and the CFO had the same ideas of spending like a 10 year old with a credit card and we all got canned within a couple of weeks of one another.

System76 has a right to charge whatever they want and I have the right to say no thanks.

If i was making the buying decisions I would never pay a vendor $1400 more for a video card per system. Think about it, if a company or university were to buy 10 of these systems that's an extra 14 grand, enough to have bought an extra system.

Nothing about this system says "smart purchase" to me.