Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 21.04 On The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X

Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 21.04 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X desktop to which Ubuntu came out roughly 8% faster than the Microsoft OS on average. But what about the difference for HEDT systems? Given the more radical performance difference we have seen in the past with Windows vs. Linux for Threadripper systems, here are some recently conducted benchmarks on that front with the 64-core Threadripper 3990X.

Using the same System76 Thelio workstation (differences in the system table just amount to automated reporting differences) with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X (64 cores / 128 threads), Gigabyte TRX40 motherboard, 4 x 32GB DDR4-3000 Corsair memory, Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics, and 500GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD, the latest Windows 10 and Ubuntu were freshly benchmarked for seeing how the performance stands.

The latest updates as of testing was using Windows 10 Build 19042 and then when enabling Windows Insider Preview releases also testing the latest at the time of Windows 10 Build 21382. Ubuntu 21.04 with Linux 5.11 and all of its defaults was freshly benchmarked after that.

Each time the operating system was tested at its respective defaults. Via the Phoronix Test Suite dozens of different benchmarks were carried out.