Now having shown the very strong AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 Linux performance for this “Strix Halo” SoC with Radeon 8060S iGPU for its integrated graphics, you may be wondering on the same hardware how this compares to Microsoft Windows 11. Today’s article is looking at the Microsoft Windows 11 Pro performance as shipped by HP on their ZBook Ultra 14 G1a laptop compared to Ubuntu 25.04 with a clean install.
Complementing all of the AMD Strix Halo Linux benchmarks from earlier in the week is a look at how the Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux performance is competing on the same hardware. As a reminder this HP ZBook Ultra G1a review unit was equipped with the 16-core AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 SoC with Radeon 8060S integrated graphics, 128GB of LPDDR5-8000 memory, 2TB Western Digital SN810 NVMe SSD, and a 2.8K 120Hz display.
Windows 11 as shipped by HP out-of-the-box was tested on the ZBook Ultra 14 G1a when receiving it followed by a clean install of Ubuntu 24.10 out-of-the-box with its Linux 6.14 and Mesa 25.0 compilers and other configuration and package defaults including all of the default (balanced) power settings and similar. The one exception on the Windows side was uninstalling the HP Wolf Security as I found it too annoying/frustrating with being prompted over with dialogs when opening different applications, etc; removing HP Wolf Security if anything should be of benefit to the Windows performance.
From there a wide range of CPU to iGPU benchmarks were run for seeing how Linux on AMD Strix Halo compares to Windows 11. Let’s start with some gaming.
