System76 Thelio Major Proves To Be A Major Player For Linux Workstations

For the past two months we have been testing the System76 Thelio Major and it's been working out extremely well with performance and reliability. The Thelio Major offering with options for Intel Core X-Series or AMD Ryzen Threadripper and resides between their standard Thelio desktop with Ryzen/Core CPUs and the Thelio Massive that sports dual Intel Xeon CPUs.

The Thelio Major is the platform we have been using for all of our AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X testing and it's been working out great. The Thelio Major besides having Threadripper and Core X-Series CPU options can be configured with up to 256GB of RAM, up to two GPUs, and up to 46TB of storage for really yielding incredibly powerful Linux workstation performance potential.

The Thelio Major configuration we have been running has a Threadripper 3990X, 128GB of RAM, dual Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards, 500GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD, and is of course preloaded with Pop!_OS 19.10. This is the platform we have been using for our Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Linux benchmarks, Clear Linux and other multi-distribution benchmarks, Windows vs. Linux performance, and FreeBSD vs. Linux scaling up to 128 threads afforded by the Threadripper 3990X.

Simply put, the System76 Thelio Major with Threadripper 3990X has been a beast. Many readers have been inquiring about the Thelio case as shown in pictures from these various articles - System76 doesn't currently sell the chassis short of one of their assembled systems. The build quality of the Thelio case is as good it looks and is manufactured entirely by System76 at their facility in Colorado.

Besides the Thelio case, the other question many readers have been inquiring about has been in regards to the thermal performance especially when maxing it out with the Threadripper 3990X. It's taken some weeks for this follow-up article as I've extensively been testing it for various benchmarks and a number of other upcoming 3990X Linux articles. But long story short in the two months so far of benchmarking the system nearly 24/7, it's been proving itself and without any thermal difficulties even with air cooling this 64-core / 128-thread HEDT processor.

Besides the Thelio Major keeping the hardware cool, the noise hasn't been an issue either. It's been incredibly quiet and an area where System76 has been tweaking their systems a lot thanks to their newly-constructed sound chamber for testing and tuning their new PC models.