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A few weeks back we reviewed [2]the redesigned System76 Thelio Mira with a brand new chassis design and powered by the AMD Ryzen 9000 series. This was an interesting Linux-powered desktop manufactured in Colorado while for those needing a bit more performance, since then the redesigned [3]Thelio Major launched. The new System76 Thelio Major provides an updated Thelio case design like Mira while comes packed with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series and AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics for delivering a very powerful, all-AMD and open-source high-end Linux workstation.

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The new Thelio Major features a redesigned chassis similar to the Thelio Mira. The wood accents are gone from the original Thelio and now there is front panel I/O ports and new design elements as part of their "precision industrialism" design. The new Thelio chassis is designed to also be more repairable than its predecessor. Like with System76's original designs and their other in-house manufactured products, the new Thelio cases remain open-source hardware designs.

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The new System76 Thelio Major is also physically a bit smaller than the prior Major while offering better thermals: a reported 13% smaller while running around 17 degrees cooler and 7% more sustained CPU speed, is reported by System76. Of course, in this review we have our own benchmarks looking at the impact of the new Thelio Major. Helping a lot here is the switch to an AIO liquid cooling loop rather than air cooling.

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System76 will begin shipping the new Thelio Major systems this month with the option of the Ryzen Threadripper 9960X / 9970X / 9980X processors or the prior generation Threadripper PRO 7955WX. There is the option of either NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics or the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 for those wanting an all-AMD open-source workstation. The new Thelio Major can be equipped with up to 256GB of DDR5-5600 memory and a variety of different SATA and NVMe SSD storage options.

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With the high-end hardware, the new Thelio Major now supports dual power supplies.

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The base pricing of the Thelio Major is $6999 USD with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9960X, NVIDIA A400 graphics, 64GB of DDR5-5600 ECC memory, 500GB PCIe M.2 SSD, and one year warranty. The review configuration as tested for the System76 Thelio Major was the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X 64-core, 128GB of DDR5-5600 ECC memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, and the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700. For that configuration with current pricing is about $15,707 USD.

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Like with System76's other PCs, the new Thelio Major can come pre-loaded with either Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS. Pop!_OS 24.04 was running great on this Threadripper + Radeon AI PRO R9700 workstation. With the Zen 5 Threadripper platform support being very mature at this point, to no surprise it was running well on Pop!_OS and other modern Linux distributions like Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44.

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Over the coming weeks will be plenty of benchmarks of the new System76 Thelio Major workstation under a variety of workloads and different areas of benchmarking. In this initial article is a look at how the new Thelio Major compares to the prior generation Thelio Major workstations at Phoronix.

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[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=system76-thelio-major-9980x&image=thelio_major_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/thelio-mira-r4-n4

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Thelio+Major

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=system76-thelio-major-9980x&image=thelio_major_2_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=system76-thelio-major-9980x&image=thelio_major_3_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=system76-thelio-major-9980x&image=thelio_major_4_lrg

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=system76-thelio-major-9980x&image=thelio_major_5_lrg

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=system76-thelio-major-9980x&image=thelio_major_6_lrg

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=system76-thelio-major-9980x&image=thelio_major_7_lrg

[10] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=system76-thelio-major-9980x&image=thelio_major_10_lrg

[11] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=system76-thelio-major-9980x&image=thelio_major_11_lrg