The AMD Ryzen 9000 which launched recently impressed reviewers with its efficiency but disappointed them with the overall performance. Interestingly, the CPU appears to be faster on Linux.

When AMD announced its Ryzen 9000 series desktop processor lineup at Computex earlier this year, the company touted big performance gains thanks to a massive 16% IPC (instructions per clock/cycle) boost.

While the company’s claims probably have not been untrue, the overall performance of a processor is the byproduct of not just IPC but the clock speed too, and this is where a lot of the media who reviewed the chip felt it fell short. For example, the octa-core Ryzen 7 9700X is much more efficient than the 7700X but it leaves performance on the table, at least on Windows 11 it seems.

According to a comparison by the German website PC Games Hardware (PCGH), it seems Windows 11 24H2 may not be the right OS choice if you have a Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPU. The site found in its comparison that in most instances, the Linux distro Nobara, which is supposedly optimized for gaming, was faster than Windows 11 24H2. And the performance gap was not limited to just gaming either as productivity tests also showed Ryzen 9700X performing better on Linux.