Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On A $199 AMD Ryzen Laptop

[steven36]

When carrying out our Windows vs. Linux benchmarks we normally are doing so on interesting high-end hardware but for today's benchmarking is a look at how a $199 USD laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor compares between Windows 10 as it's shipped on the laptop against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

 

 

The $199 AMD laptop being used for testing is the Motile M141, a 14-inch laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U and Vega 3 graphics, 4GB of RAM, 120GB solid-state drive, and 1080p display. This 14-inch Ryzen 3 laptop is currently selling for just $199 USD at Walmart. While never hearing of Motile previously, I decided to go ahead and buy this laptop for some Linux testing... Motile is a private-label brand from Walmart.

 

The Ryzen 3 3200U powering this laptop is dual core plus SMT yields four threads, there is a 2.6GHz base frequency, 3.5GHz boost clock, and 4MB L3 cache. With the Vega 3 graphics there is a 15 Watt combined TDP for this chip.

 

I've been running the Motile 14 for a few days now and was quite surprised by the laptop for this very low price point. The build quality is better than expected for $199 USD, the ports on this laptop are sufficient, and everything has been working as expected. As of publishing, the Motile M141 is still being sold at Walmart.com for $199 USD. The next cheapest Ryzen 3 3200U laptop we've found is an HP model that goes for $269 USD while most other Ryzen 3 3200U laptops are $400+ USD.

 

One of the downsides to this Motile M141-SL laptop is that the 4GB of RAM is a single DIMM. I'll run some additional tests after upgrading to two DDR4-2400 (the max speed supported by the Ryzen 3 3200U) DIMMs that should allow this Picasso APU much better performance. It is nice though that this Motile laptop has upgradeable RAM and storage.

 

 

So for $199 USD, no major complaints. While Microsoft Windows 10 Home is preloaded on this budget laptop, Ubuntu 19.10 / 20.04 LTS daily does run fine on it along with other Linux distributions -- I'll be testing more Linux distributions on it as time allows. UEFI Secure Boot can be easily disabled from the BIOS.

 

Today the focus is just looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS daily vs. Windows 10 performance from this Ryzen 3 laptop. Coming next week will also be tests of this Ryzen 3 3200U laptop against other laptops for putting the AMD mobile performance capabilities under Linux into more perspective.

 

First up is looking at the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browser performance from this $199 Ryzen 3 laptop.

 

The web browser performance between Windows and Linux with Firefox and Chrome tended to be quite close off this AMD Ryzen 3 3200U system. Depending upon the benchmark the winner varied, but both operating systems picked up wins and at the end of the day for an end-user the speed is likely to be similar under both operating systems for this entry-level Motile laptop.

 

One area where Ubuntu 20.04 with its default EXT4 file-system is much faster than Windows 10 was when running the SQLite embedded database library test off the solid-state storage.

 

When running the open-source Xonotic game that is OpenGL-powered and well supported on each operating system, with low quality settings Ubuntu 20.04 daily was much faster than Windows 10 with the Vega 3 graphics.

 

But when increasing the visual intensity of Xonotic, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS then fell behind the Windows 10 performance for the Motile 14 laptop. Xonotic is one of the few games running nicely off the Vega 3 graphics and cross-platform friendly. Don't expect to do too much out of gaming on a $199 laptop.

 

Java text rendering performance did come out much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 with this Ryzen 3 3200U laptop.

 

With various GpuTest OpenGL test cases, the results were mixed between Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux.

 

With the ParaView workstation visualization software, Windows 10 was offering better performance than Ubuntu 20.04 in its development state on this Ryzen 3 laptop.

 

Throughout a variety of Java benchmarks, the Linux vs. Windows performance was quite close with both operating systems tested using OpenJDK 11.

 

Under varying chess benchmarks on this two core / four thread low-end mobile processor. the results were generally close between Windows and Ubuntu.

 

The GraphicsMagick imaging program tended to run much better on Linux, which we've seen on other systems in the past as well.

 

Intel's Embree path-tracer was running faster on Ubuntu granted too much to handle for a Ryzen 3 processor.

 

Various video benchmarks were generally favoring Ubuntu for better performance though I wouldn't recommend much in the way of video encoding from such a low-end device.

 

File compression performance was similar between the two tested operating systems.

 

Single-threaded tasks like MP3 and FLAC audio encoding were running well on the Ryzen 3 3200U.

 

The GIMP image editing software was running much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 in its development state than GIMP 2.10 on Windows 10.

 

Python 3 performance is still much faster on Linux than Windows.

 

If planning to do any web/LAMP development from the budget laptop and testing PHP scripts locally, Ubuntu's PHP7 performance continues running much stronger than Windows 10.

Git also continues running much faster on Linux.

 

Out of 63 tests ran on both operating systems, Ubuntu 20.04 was the fastest with coming in front 60% of the time.

 

If taking the geometric mean of all 63 tests, the Motile $199 laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U was 15% faster on Ubuntu Linux over Windows 10.

 

Lastly here are some thermal and power metrics of Ubuntu running on the Motile 14 $199 laptop for reference when encountering a variety of single and multi-threaded workloads.

 

Under load, the average system temperature was just 46 degrees and a peak of 78 degrees... Not bad for the wide workloads tested.

 

The GPU temperature was quite similar to the system temperature due to being on the Ryzen 3 3200U.

 

On average under load this laptop was drawing 13.5 Watts on battery with a peak of 35 Watts. More monitoring metrica via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

 

Overall the Motile 141 laptop is a decent laptop for the $199 USD price point. Tests comparing the Motile 14 Ryzen 3 3200U performance against other Linux laptops as well as other interesting benchmarks out of this $199 laptop will be coming up soon on Phoronix.

 

 

While waiting on more comparison benchmarks, those wanting to see how the Motile M141 laptop compares to your own Windows or Linux system(s), simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 2001319-VE-MOTILE98649 for your own fully-automated, side-by-side comparison against all the Windows/Linux benchmarks found in this article.

 

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