System76 Pangolin Review: the 15" all rounder AMD Linux laptop

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#linux #laptop #system76

00:00 Intro
00:26 Sponsor: Get 10% off your first website with Squarespace
01:12 Design and Build Quality
03:08 Specs and Configurations
04:50 Port Selection
06:11 Performance & battery life
08:01 Keyboard & Touchpad
09:37 Webcam, Mic & Speakers
10:47 PopOS integration
11:51 Who is this for?
13:01 Support the channel

The Pangolin looks like your standard 15 inch ultrabook. It’s pretty thin, at 0.71 inches, or 1.8cm, and it weighs 1.79kilos, or almost 4 pounds. It’s 16:9, with a 15.6 inches screen, and it’s made of aluminium. The aluminium chassis is robust, with minimal deck flex around the hinge or the palm rests, and a bit more give in the middle of the keyboard.

And it’s also pretty modular, you can open the laptop easily with 11 screws. Only the battery, wireless card and storage are accessible, the RAM seems soldered.

It comes with the Ryzen 7 6800U, an 8 core, 16 threads beast that goes up to 4.7 Gigahertz. It’s paired with the integrated Radeon 680M. You also can only get it with 32 gigs of RAM. In terms of storage, you get a minimum of a 250Gig PCIE4 NVME SSD, and can go up to 16 TB.

It comes with WIfie 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.

The display is 15.6 inches, and only 1080p. It’s 144hz refresh rate, and has a 70 Wh battery.

So, on the left, you get the barrel charger, an HDMI 2.0 port, 2 USB 3.2 Gen 2 type A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 type C port that supports display port 1.4 and also support charging the device.

You also get a headphone jack, and, interestingly, a physical killswitch for the webcam complete with a little LED to let you know when the camera is off.

On the right, you have another type A USB 3.2GEN 2, a full size SD card reader, which is nice, a pop-out gigabit ethernet port, and that little kensington lock to keep your laptop attached to your desk.

The Ryzen 7 6800U is a pretty powerful CPU. On Geekbench 6, it got a single core score of 2002 and a multi core score of 8662.

In terms of graphics, the integrated Radeon 680M can deliver surprisingly good performance. Running the usual Shadow of the tomb raider benchmark, at the native 1080p and medium settings, it got 30 FPS. On low settings, it managed an average of 42 FPS.

As per thermals, at idle, the CPU ran at around 34 to 38 degrees Celsius, and under load, during gameplay, it never went past 91 degrees.

Now for the battery life, with the display at 144hz, in balanced mode, running youtube videos in a loop on Firefox, it lasted for 7 hours.

When putting it in battery saving mode, with the display running at 60hz, it lasted for 8 and a half hours.

The Pangolin comes with a chiclet style keyboard. It’s backlit. It comes with a numpad, and it’s nice to use. Key travel is good, the stroke is precise, and the keys are large and nice. It comes with a SUPER key, of course

As per the touchpad, it’s a decent size, it’s very smooth, and while it’s not centered which always annoys me, it works really well with Pop OS’s gestures, the click is solid and doesn’t rattle at all and the sound is satisfying. The only issue is with the two button spaces at the bottom: they don’t react to tap to click, which can lead to some missed inputs.

The webcam is 720p, and it’s just not good. It’s super stuttery, it’s still a potato cam. The microphone is above average.

As per the speakers, they get pretty loud, but at max volume, they’ll definitely start vibrating the chassis and you’ll hear that sort of rattly sound. Apart from that, they do have a bit of bass, and they don’t sound too tinny. They’re good enough, basically, but not at max volume.