Bonobo Extreme

We returned our System76 Kudu Professional because it was very slow when editing more than 100,000 faces and vertices. We figured this was due to the integrated Intel graphics card.

We replaced it with a System76 Bonobo Extreme with the following hardware:

• nVidia GeForce GTX 870M with 6 GB & 1344 CUDA cores
• 16 GB RAM
• Intel i7-4810MQ (2.8 GHz, 4 cores)
• 17.3" 1920x1080 matte display
• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64 bit

So far, the new system works beautifully for Blender. It doesn't have any trouble editing and displaying complex objects with more than 100,000 faces/vertices. And it's a little bit faster than the Kudo (1:37 to render the BMW vs. 1:43).

GPU rendering is actually slower than the CPU rendering, but I think that's because I'm using an older driver (331.38 which is part of Ubuntu 14.04) instead of the latest which is designed for the GTX 870M card (340.32). I plan to try again once Ubuntu 14.10 is released in a few months.

One cool thing: The backlit keyboard is nice and you can cycle through different colors as in the pic at the right.

One not-so-cool thing: The touch pad is so large that it picks up my palm movement when typing and moves the cursor around, sometimes leading to bad typos. I usually just use a mouse connected with USB and turn off the touch pad with fn-F1.