AMD Threadripper 3990X + RX 5700 XT System76 Thelio Major Performance After 2 Years

Next month marks two years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-thread processor. All of our testing of the 3990X on Linux over the past two years has been with the System76 Thelio Major, which continues holding up well with that US-assembled workstation with hand-crafted enclosure from Colorado. With System76 having recently released Pop!_OS 21.10 as the latest update to their Ubuntu Linux derived operating system and upcoming two year anniversary of the 3990X, it made for an interesting time to see how the performance of the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and Radeon RX 5700 XT within that workstation has evolved.

For getting the rough two year look at the Threadripper 3990X and Radeon RX 5700 XT performance under Linux, Pop!_OS 20.04 was benchmarked against the recently released Pop!_OS 21.10. The System76 Thelio Major review unit as tested came equipped with the Threadripper 3990X, Gigabyte TRX40 AORUS PRO WIFI motherboard, 4 x 32GB DDR4-3200 memory, Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB NVMe solid-state drive, and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics.

On this System76 Thelio Major workstation Pop!_OS was cleanly installed each time to the desired release for seeing how the AMD Linux performance has evolved over the roughly two years. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of benchmarks were carried out for looking at the system performance across dozens of real-world workloads.