AMD Ryzen 9 5900X On Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance: Windows Looks Surprisingly Good This Time

For those curious how the AMD Zen 3 performance is looking between Windows and Linux, here are the first round of benchmarks with a Ryzen 9 5900X system.

While with the large Threadripper and EPYC systems we are used to Linux slaughtering Windows performance, with the "smaller" Ryzen 9 5900X it's a bit more of a friendly race. The test system used for this Windows 10 vs. Linux testing was the Ryzen 9 5900X at stock speeds with the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO motherboard on the latest BIOS as of testing, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 memory, 1TB Sabrent Rocket 4.0 1TB NVMe SSD, and the Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics. The RX 6800 XT graphics though isn't the focus of today's testing and for that you can see yesterday's Windows 10 vs. Linux RDNA 2 numbers.

Windows 10 October 2020 with all stable release updates was used for testing. On the Linux side both Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 20.10 were used for testing. With the bleeding-edge Ubuntu 20.10 it was also upgraded to Linux 5.10 Git (and Mesa 21.0-dev) for a very latest look at the Linux performance for this 12-core / 24-thread Zen 3 system. All three operating systems were maintained at their operating system defaults during testing.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of Windows/Linux benchmarks native to each platform were used for testing where they are known to be of similar quality platform support. For those wondering about Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), I do have some fresh numbers there being published over the next week or two from Zen 3 as well.