The Power Efficiency Between Ubuntu 19.04, Clear Linux & openSUSE Tumbleweed With CompuLab's Airtop 3

With CompuLab's incredibly well engineered Airtop 3 fan-less computer that is built to meet rugged industrial requirements while being loaded with an 8-core/16-thread Xeon CPU, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics, 64GB of RAM, and NVMe solid-state storage, here is an interesting benchmark comparison of Ubuntu 19.04, Clear Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Given the interesting system under test, not only is the raw performance being looked at but also the performance-per-Watt / AC power consumption and CPU thermal differences between these Linux operating systems.

The CompuLab Airtop 3 review sample as a reminder was loaded with a Xeon E-2288G 8-core / 16-thread CPU, 64GB of RAM, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics (using the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver throughout all the tests considering the otherwise poor Turing state for Nouveau), and a 250GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD all while being passively cooled.

Ubuntu 19.04, Clear Linux 30970, and openSUSE Tumbleweed were all freshly installed on this industrial-grade PC out-of-the-box and left in their default settings for benchmarking. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of benchmarks were carried out while it was also monitoring the AC power consumption (using a WattsUp Pro power meter) as well as the CPU core temperature, an area we normally don't look at much for our cross-distribution benchmarks.