MindStudio has flagged a serious Linux performance problem on an MSI Prestige N16 Flip with NVIDIA RTX Spark hardware. On that laptop, in MindStudio’s own testing, native Linux slowed down hard the moment the system was plugged in. Windows did much better, and even Windows Subsystem for Linux, running through Windows, came out far ahead.
The gap in MindStudio’s numbers is hard to ignore. On Windows, the MSI Prestige N16 Flip reached about 65.4 tokens per second for GPT-OSS-120B. On Linux, with the charger connected, that dropped to 13.9 on the same machine. In a second workload, a run that took roughly 8 minutes on Windows reportedly stretched to 37 minutes on Linux.
MindStudio’s data points more toward power management than heat. Temperatures stayed between 40 and 47°C, so the machine wasn’t cooking itself. What changed was clock speed: the GPU ran at around 2.2 GHz on Windows, then fell to roughly 780 to 790 MHz on plugged-in Linux, and climbed back to about 1,800 MHz on battery power. That makes the pattern pretty clear. The slowdown appears tied to charging state, not to Linux as a whole.
MindStudio says the most likely culprit is Nvidia Platform Controllers and Framework. According to the company, Windows relies on an encrypted firmware power table that Linux drivers reportedly can’t decrypt, and when that controller was disabled in Windows, the same sluggish behavior showed up there too. If you use Linux regularly on Nvidia RTX Spark, that’s something to pay attention to.
For now, the best way to run Linux on this hardware may be WSL on Windows, which MindStudio says reached 65.1 tokens per second. There are a few other details mixed into this: some systems can ship with 128 GB of unified memory, with 96 GB reserved for the GPU by default; that setting can only be changed in Windows; and these results still mostly come from a single MSI Prestige N16 Flip model. There’s also no public fix yet, and Nvidia hasn’t put out an official statement.
Author: Manuel Bosque
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