Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Windows 11 vs. CachyOS Performance On A $5399 Laptop

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Earlier this month on Phoronix I reviewed the Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 as the first laptop Razer is certifying for Linux use via Canonical’s hardware certification program for Linux. It offered very nice performance with the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics albeit costly with a configured price of $5399 USD. That review featured benchmarks on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS but for those wondering about the performance of Ubuntu against Windows 11 on this gaming/AI developer laptop, here are comparison benchmarks plus also tossing in the rolling-release CachyOS distribution.

In this article are benchmarks of Microsoft Windows 11 as configured out-of-the-box by Razer compared to the stock Ubuntu 26.04 LTS environment with the Linux 7.0 kernel and other default software components. Lastly, the performance-focused Arch Linux based CachyOS distribution was tested on the same laptop too for seeing what more leading-edge Linux performance looks like on this laptop.

Considering the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics in use, the official NVIDIA Windows/Linux drivers were used for all of the testing as shipped in each distribution’s repository. No Nouveau comparison but a separate NVIDIA vs. Nouveau comparison is coming for those curious about the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU performance.

With the rolling CachyOS as of last week it was using the Linux 7.1 kernel, GCC 16.1.1, and already on to the NVIDIA R610 driver compared to Windows 11 and Ubuntu 26.04 being on R595.

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