Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Performance On AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

For those wondering how the performance compares of AMD's new Zen 2 processors between Windows 10 and Linux, here are our initial benchmarks across dozens of benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X on Windows 10 Pro 1903 against Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS.

This is the first of surely several Windows vs. Linux performance comparisons to come of these new AMD Zen 2 processors. In this article is just Windows 10 against Ubuntu 18.04 LTS since the ASUS has yet to ship the new BIOS for the ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi to allow newer (non-patched) Linux distributions to boot without problems due to the systemd/RdRand issue. Once that BIOS update is available for this system to address that Linux boot issue, other Linux distributions will be added to the comparison.

The test system for this first cross-OS comparison was the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X at stock speeds, ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 memory, 2TB Corsair Force MP600 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 560 graphics (this round of testing isn't focused on gaming performance but strictly CPU related workloads).

Both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS had all available system updates at the time of testing. Via the Phoronix Test Suite some 66 benchmarks were run on both Windows and Linux for this round of benchmarking.