System76 Pangolin Makes For A Nice All-AMD Linux Laptop

When taking the geometric mean of the 100+ benchmarks carried out, the System76 Pangolin was about 5% faster than the MSI laptop with Core i7 1280P Alder Lake processor or 10% faster than the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen3 with higher-end Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U but that is tuned for better power efficiency by default.

When looking at the CPU power consumption across all of the benchmarks tested, the 6800U inside the Pangolin had a 23 Watt average draw and a peak of 40 Watts, well below the Core i7 1280P with its 35 Watt average and 80 Watt peak.

The System76 Pangolin thermals were in good shape at 75 degrees across the span of different workloads benchmarked for hours on end.

The NVMe drive temperature was also the lowest of all the tested laptops.

The System76 Pangolin system temperature was also the lowest between it and the MSI and HP laptops. (The system temperature sensor within the X1 Carbon Gen3 was not functioning correctly.)

Overall the System76 Pangolin is a nice contender when it comes to a performance-oriented, all-AMD laptop design that boasts 32GB of dual channel memory by default, a 1080p 144Hz display, decent battery life, and easy repairability along with a nice selection of connectivity options. The performance out-of-the-box on Pop1_OS 22.04 was great and all functionality was working on this laptop. It was a fun few weeks testing out this laptop as my first time trying out one of System76's all-AMD laptop designs.

The main downside with the System76 Pangolin "pang12" model is that it launched so late in the Rembrandt cycle. We are days/weeks away from seeing more AMD Ryzen Mobile 7040U series laptops making their appearance from major OEMs and we'll be seeing a lot of those Zen 4 + RDNA3 laptops over the months ahead. In any case though, the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U is still a very capable processor and with good integrated graphics. Plus the AMD Rembrandt Linux support is quite mature at this point. So there are both pros and cons in going for Rembrandt later in the cycle and for Linux users means a more polished experience.

I'd also love to see System76 go all-in on USB Type-C charging as it makes compatibility much nicer. It'd also be nice to see a higher resolution display option available but at the end of the day this is a nice AMD Ryzen laptop offering from System76. The System76 Pangolin with Ryzen 7 6800U and 32GB of RAM starts out at $1299 USD. More details on this AMD Linux laptop can be found at System76.com. Thanks to System76 to allow for testing this laptop the past several weeks.