I’ve spent the past few weeks testing the latest System76 Pangolin laptop, which has proven itself as a pure AMD 15-inch laptop running the company’s increasingly popular Pop!_OS Linux distribution.
The System76 Pangolin features an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U “Rembrandt” SoC with integrated Radeon 680M graphics. The 7800U offers 8 cores/16 threads for this Zen 3 + RDNA2 design with clock speeds up to 4.7 GHz. System76 only recently introduced this Pangolin theme, which is a bit unfortunate given the number of AMD Phoenix laptops expected to launch in the coming weeks/months. That would be my biggest disappointment for the device launching this year and coming so close to next-gen AMD laptops launching with Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics. Either way, the Ryzen 7 6800U remains a very capable mobile processor, but for those always on the lookout for the latest and greatest, the timing is a bit unfortunate.
The System76 Pangolin features a 15-inch 1080p display, and what makes it even more interesting is that it has a 144Hz refresh rate. This laptop supports up to two NVMe M.2 SSDs and up to 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 storage.
System76 Pangolin connectivity includes three USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, an SD card reader, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2 and HDMI 2.0. The connectivity variety is great, especially since the device still has a physical HDMI 2.0 port as well as Gigabit Ethernet compared to many ultra-thin designs that forgo these ports. There’s also a Kensington lock slot on this laptop, which is nice to look at for frequent travelers or in shared work environments.
The webcam with the Pangolin is a 1.0 MP 720p HD web camera that isn’t particularly fancy but gets the job done. The Pangolin relies on a 65-watt keg charger, which comes standard in the box. It would be great if System76 would default to USB Type-C charging on their future models, but unfortunately still the legacy charger, while the Pangolin supports Type-C charging. I’ve had some issues with Type-C charging, particularly when using various Dell USB-C chargers, but System76 is investigating the issue and may only affect this review unit.
The System76 Pangolin (pang12) measures 37 x 24.7 x 1.8 cm and weighs 1.79 kg. By default, Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS ran on the Pangolin, while System76 also offers Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as an option.
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