TUXEDO Sirius 16 Gen 2 Linux Laptop Pairs The AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS With Radeon RX 7600M XT

While AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops have begun appearing with Zen 5 CPU cores, to date the launched laptops have revolved around having either the integrated Radeon 890M RDNA3.5 graphics and/or NVIDIA GeForce discrete graphics. For those wanting a Linux-friendly laptop with Radeon discrete graphics for more gaming and GPU/compute potential, that still leaves the still very powerful Zen 4 laptop options. Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers recently launched the Sirius 16 Gen 2 as a nice workstation/gaming laptop featuring the Ryzen 7 8845HS with Radeon RX 7600M XT discrete graphics.

The TUXEDO Sirius 16 Gen 2 ships with the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS Zen 4 SoC, which is a bit unfortunate given that the Ryzen AI 300 series was announced a month ago, but presumably with time we'll see Ryzen AI 300 options emerge from TUXEDO and other Linux PC vendors. In any event the Ryzen 7 8845HS is still a very capable laptop SoC with great performance -- the Ryzen AI 300 series just really excels when it comes to power efficiency and demanding workloads like those relying heavily on AVX-512. If power efficiency and AVX-512 performance are very important for your Linux laptop needs, you may want to wait until Ryzen AI 300 series options with discrete Radeon graphics emerge, but otherwise the Sirius 16 Gen 2 has proven to be a great option for Linux computing needs right now.

On the plus side the Ryzen 7 8845HS / Zen 4 support on Linux is very mature at this point and runs without issues. TUXEDO OS continues to be based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS right now and works great with this laptop. Other modern Linux distributions work great as well from this hardware. With the Ryzen AI 300 series, you need to be running a very recent Linux kernel and Mesa, have the most up-to-date Linux firmware files, and potentially be aware of workarounds such as Panel Self Refresh (PSR) disabling and few other caveats pointed out in my prior Ryzen AI 300 series Linux testing.

The AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS as a reminder is an 8-core / 16-thread Zen 4 processor with a 3.8GHz base clock and a boost clock up to 5.1GHz. The Ryzen 7 8845HS has a 45 Watt default TDP and a cTDP from 35 to 54 Watts.

Beyond the Ryzen 7 8845HS and Radeon RX 7600M XT graphics, the Sirius 16 Gen2 laptop features an all-aluminum chassis, 16.1-inch display with 2560 x 1440 resolution, support for up to 8TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD storage, up to 96GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, and a 80 Wh battery. Yes, it's DDR5-5600 rather than LPDDR5x-7500 but at least upgradeable.

On the left side of the TUXEDO Sirius 16 Gen 2 is a USB 3.2 Gen2 A port and headphone/microphone analog audio jacks. On the right side are USB-C and USB 3 ports.

At the rear of the laptop is a Gigabit Ethernet port, HDMI output, USB-C, and the charging port. With having a 230 Watt power supply, there is the dedicated charging jack. The USB-C port on the right hand side of the laptop does allow for optional USB-C power delivery. The USB-C port on the right side of the laptop is hard-wired to the iGPU for DisplayPort 1.4 graphics while the USB-C port at the rear is connected to the Radeon RX 7600M XT discrete graphics for DisplayPort 1.4 connectivity. The rear USB-C with the RX 7600M XT can work with FreeSync if so desired.

The keyboard is quite comfortable and large thanks to the 16-inch form factor of the laptop. The off-center touchpad may be annoyance to some.

The TUXEDO Sirius 16 Gen 2 review configuration as supplied by TUXEDO Computers:

TUXEDO advertises the Sirius 16 Gen 2 as having up to 10 hours of battery life with minimum brightness, without WiFi and Bluetooth, and without the keyboard backlight while idling. This is accurate in those conditions but most will certainly run with WiFi enabled and a higher brightness level in which case it's around a six hour battery life.