With the HP ZBook Ultra G1a Strix Halo laptop sporting the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics it offers incredible performance potential as shown in my many benchmarks over the past month on Ubuntu Linux. But if wanting to push the Ryzen AI Max even further, with performance-optimized Linux distributions like CachyOS and Intel’s Clear Linux it’s possible to tap some additional performance out of this 16-core Zen 5 laptop.
In the past I’ve shown what it’s like with pushing AMD Strix Point on the Framework 13 further with different Linux distributions and the nice out-of-the-box performance being achived with the Arch Linux based CachyOS. As part of testing the HP ZBook Ultra G1a on more Linux distributions for support/compatibility and curious about any added performance, I ended up running a 7-way Linux OS benchmark comparison on this AMD Strix Halo laptop.
Tested were Arch Linux, CachyOS, Clear Linux 43580, Debian 13 Testing, Fedora Workstation 42, Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS, and Ubuntu 25.04. Each Linux distribution was tested in its default / out-of-the-box state for seeing how these different Linux distributions are performing with the high-end AMD Strix Halo laptop from HP.
The same HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop was used for all the tests with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics, 64GB of RAM, and 2TB NVMe SSD.
In addition to looking at the raw performance the CPU power consumption was also monitored during the testing process.
