GoKawiilSystem76 Thelio Mira Custom 5 / 5 Excellent pros and cons Pros All the power you could ever want.
Great, quiet design that's easy to repair or add to.
The Linux workstation of your dreams. Cons It's not cheap. $1,699 at System76
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Sure, you could build a more powerful Linux workstation, but even then, you'd be hard-pressed to make a better machine than System76's new 2026 Thelio Mira Custom desktop PC. That's because the computer is both very powerful and quiet as a whisper.
The 2026 Mira refresh is built around AMD's Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" platform on an X870 motherboard. This setup gives you PCIe 5.0 for GPUs and SSDs, providing up to 32 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) per lane, which adds up to 64 gigabytes per second (GB/s) and 128 GB/s of bidirectional throughput. Combine that power with Gen5 Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) sequential throughput of up to 15 GB/s, and we're talking seriously fast I/O.
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That's a good thing, because the Mira Custom CPU options range from a 6-core Ryzen 5 9600X at the low end up to a 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X or 9950X3D, with boost clocks advertised up to 5.7 GHz on the top SKUs. In my case, I had a 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X that ticked along at 4.3 GHz. When I put the pedal to the metal, it zipped along at 5.7 GHz.
For graphics, I could have used the Ryzen's integrated graphics, but my PC also came with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 with 12 GB of VRAM. That capability is fine for today's 1080p/1440p games, but it's not enough VRAM for top-of-the-line 4K competitive gaming.
You can also plug displays into both graphics outputs and use System76's default Linux operating system, Pop!_OS, which provides on-the-fly GPU switching via a graphical interface. In addition, you can assign specific apps to run on the discrete GPU. So, for example, you can use the Ryzen to run graphics while dedicating the GeForce to AI workloads.
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