AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Benchmarks On 11 Linux Distributions

Now that BIOS updates over the past month have resolved the early boot issue with Ryzen 3000 processors and thus the new AMD CPUs playing nicely with modern Linux distributions, here is the long-awaited benchmark comparison of the Ryzen 9 3900X + X570 system benchmarked across an array of different Linux distributions... In fact, 11 Linux OS releases in total were tested on this high-end 12-core / 24-thread desktop processor.

Last week was a look at eight Linux distributions on the AMD EPYC 7742 2P server while this is the desktop equivalent and pulling in more distributions given the more diverse Linux desktop ecosystem. The Ryzen 9 3900X was running at stock speeds on the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi motherboard with 2TB Corsair Force MP600 PCIe 4.9 NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 560 graphics (not the focus of today's tests).

Each Linux distribution was cleanly installed and tested out-of-the-box with all available updates as of testing. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of benchmarks were carried out.

Given the latest BIOS updates for the ASUS X570 motherboards, there weren't any Ryzen 9 3900X (Zen 2) or X570 compatibility problems to note. The only Linux hardware compatibility to mention was Intel's Clear Linux not detecting the Corsair Force MP600 PCIe4 solid-state drive. It appears to be due to Intel's power management policies and similar Samsung NVMe SSD issues we saw before on AMD platforms with Clear Linux, the MP600 was not working. So for the Clear Linux testing we resorted to using an older (and slower) Corsair Force MP500 SSD on this system while running Clear Linux.

The tested Linux distributions were Clear Linux 30940, Debian 10.0, Debian Testing, Endeavour OS, Fedora Workstation 30, Manjaro Linux 18.0.4, Solus 4.0, Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 19.04, Ubuntu 19.10 daily, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.