My employer bought me a System76 Oryx Pro which I customized with a Nvidia 4070, 32 GB of RAM and 2TB of extra NVMe storage. It came out to almost $3000 including tax and shipping.

My intended use is for software development, audio engineering and AI research and development. So far so good! It’s a great computer. I removed the Pop!_OS distribution installed by the vendor and replaced it with Ubuntu Studio 23.10. All the hardware does what I expect. The GPU has decent specs. Here’s the output of nvidia-smi

Sat Dec 30 20:29:41 2023
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.129.03             Driver Version: 535.129.03   CUDA Version: 12.2     |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                      |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 ...    Off | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   51C    P8               3W / 115W |     31MiB /  8188MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                      |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

In the office it can drive two 27” displays connected via DisplayPort to a Thunderblot 3 dock. This was non-trivial to set up. More on that later. It runs with the built-in screen, which means the GPU can power three screens. I keep the lid closed when it’s on the desk. I’m using it more like a desktop workstation. It’s pretty heavy and with the GPU has about 2 hours of battery life.

The vendor is very good with their hardware specs. They publish detailed technical documentation for all hardware components. While all the hardware works as I expected, that doesn’t mean I think it’s perfect. Here’s some notes.

REALLY LOUD FANS! HOLY SHIT.

This computer is not acceptable to have in a meeting room. It’s quite embarassing when the fans kick in.

Oversized built in keyboard and off-center trackpad

Why is there a number pad on a laptop? No one has ever asked for a keyboard like this. I constantly press the up arrow or the number 4 when trying to use the left shift and enter keys. It feels like it was designed by someone who never used a keyboard before.

The trackpad is offset to the left of center. No idea why, I guess to “free up space” for the number pad that I don’t want to use?

Ambiguous USB-C connectors

It has two USB-C connectors, one on the rear and one on the right. Only one of these supports Thunderbolt 3. The one on the right side with the electric spark icon, which is very small and easy to miss. The rear USB-C connector is just USB-C and has a normal USB icon. This can be confusing when connecting a Thunderbolt display or adapter to the rear, as it will appear broken.

Short radio range

The Bluetooth and Wifi chips are on the same module and each antenna connection has a shorter range compared to other devices.

The bluetooth radio with Airpods Pro drops out at about 15 feet compared to the same headphones paired with an iPad Pro, which has no drop outs for 25 to 30 feet.

The 2.4 GHz wifi radio has about half the signal strength of my iPad Pro from the same location. The 5 GHz seems to be a little better.

Kernel drivers crash intermittently

The bluetooth driver just like, crashes sometimes. The icon disapears from the KDE toolbar.

The Thunderbolt driver crashes when my docking station is disconnected and reconnected…sometimes. After the crash dumps some debugging info to dmesg the dock continues to work for the displays but not as a USB hub or Ethernet adapter. A restart is required.

Sleep

Sleep mode works fine with the function key button and the lid closing. I keep the lid close action to just turning off that display since the computer sits closed on a desk most of the time.

One bug with sleep is that attaching the dock (see below) after waking from sleep does not detect the USB ports on the dock. No idea way. A proper reboot brings this hardware back.

Thunderbolt dock problem

I have a StarTech tb3cdk2dp which when both DP displays are connected outputs the following error. Only one display is detected.

[  132.442842] thunderbolt 0000:00:0d.2: 1:11: DP tunnel activation failed, aborting

The solution is kind of random. I started with a cable that is rated for “100W at 10gb/s”. Not all USB-C cables are the same. There’s a neat video by Adam Savage’s Tested which explains why Apple’s retail price is $130 for a USB-C cable. You can get them cheaper but the data/power rating does matter for driving multiple displays.

The dock seems to have some weird bug which depends on the ports connecting in order. Here’s what consistently works.

  1. Connect thunderbolt 3 cable to right side of laptop computer (the only thunderbolt
  2. Connect DP port 2 going to upper right display
  3. Boot computer
  4. Connect DP port 1 going to upper left display after logged in

Overall this is a great laptop. I’ll likely buy one for myself when the Thinkpad stops working