System76 Galago UltraPro Haswell Ultrabook

Among the benchmarks and Linux tests I've carried from the System76 Galago UltraPro include:

- Intel Iris Pro Linux Performance Doubles With Driver Upgrades
- Intel Iris Pro Linux Graphics Yield Some Wins Against Windows
- Intel Iris Pro 5200 vs. HD Graphics 4600
- Linux OpenGL: Ubuntu 13.04/13.10 vs. Fedora 19/20
- Intel Core i7 Haswell Benchmarks On Linux 3.12
- LLVM Clang 3.4 SVN Compiler Tests With Core-AVX2
- Ubuntu 13.10 vs. Fedora Linux CPU Benchmarks
- New Linux Mesa Git Benchmarks Of Intel's Iris Pro
- Ubuntu 13.10 XMir Performance Benchmarks
- Liquorix 3.11 Kernel Benchmarks
- The First Wayland Benchmarks From Fedora 20

There's also been a few other Phoronix benchmarking articles featuring the Galago UltraPro, but those have been the main ones over the past month. More Linux benchmark results can be found for the System76 Galago UltraPro on OpenBenchmarking.org.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the performance of the Galago UltraPro as with the hardware itself. The Core i7 4750HQ processor is a terrific performer and the graphics capabilities of the Iris Pro 5200 with 128MB of dedicated on-die video memory are splendid. For those owners of the ultrabook or thinking about buying it, it's definitely worth the upgrade from Ubuntu 13.04 to 13.10 for vastly better performance thanks to the newer kernel, compiler, and Mesa graphics packages.

The only major complaint I have with the System76 Galago UltraPro is its laptop. Too often I was having keys not register properly and this doesn't appear to be an isolated incident based upon hearing others expressing System76 keyboard issues too.

Pricing on the laptop begins at $999 USD for the Core i7 4750HQ + Iris Pro 5200 configuration and 4GB of RAM and a 500GB SATA 2.0 HDD while upgrading the memory or disk drive will drive up the price from there. Thanks to System76 for loaning this Haswell ultrabook for the past month for Linux testing and to review this nice laptop, you can find this laptop and others at their web site, System76.com.