System76 has announced the Thelio Prime, a compact 11-liter (288 x 148.9 x 281.9 mm) desktop built at the company's Denver facility. The chassis is made from milled stainless steel and aluminium parts. To add a bit of finesse, there's a smoked-glass front panel and tool-free magnetic side panels. The interior is designed with two thermal chambers, separating the CPU and GPU. As for performance, System76 describes it as "An 11-liter Linux desktop that fits almost anywhere, without giving up on performance." Users can choose from an AMD Ryzen 9000 processor (up to Ryzen 7 9850X3D) with integrated Radeon graphics or go for a discrete AMD or NVIDIA GPU (up to RTX 5070), depending on configuration. The system can have up to 96 GB of dual-channel DDR5 and up to 8 TB of storage across its M.2 slots (one PCIe 5.0 and one PCIe 4.0).

Front I/O offers a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C, a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, and the audio jack. The rear adds two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, one USB 3.2 Gen 1, four USB 2.0 ports, a BIOS Flashback button, and audio line-out. Networking covers 2.5 GbE, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.2. Display outputs depend on the GPU. Integrated graphics get HDMI 2.1 and USB-C with DisplayPort 1.4. A discrete GPU option typically adds three DisplayPort outputs and one HDMI. Power comes from a 600 W 80 Plus certified supply with at least 90% efficiency. The system comes preinstalled with Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC Desktop Environment or with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The Thelio Prime is expected to launch November 18, starting at $1,599.