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Nvidia's new AI laptop runs nearly 80% slower on Linux — but only when it's plugged in

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Nvidia's new AI laptop runs nearly 80% slower on Linux — but only when it's plugged in

We all know that plugging in your laptop is supposed to make it faster, but new testing of an Nvidia-powered laptop found the exact opposite, with AI performance dropping by nearly 80% when running Linux.

The surprising discovery comes from MindStudio, which tested an MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+ powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark platform. The team wanted to see whether Linux could run on the machine without sacrificing the performance available through Windows.

It could, but there was a major catch. When running OpenAI's GPT-OSS-120B model, the laptop generated 65.4 tokens per second on Windows. Running Linux directly on the same hardware while plugged into a charger brought that figure down to just 13.9 tokens per second.

That's a nearly 79% reduction in AI performance simply from changing the operating system. But even stranger, unplugging the laptop brought much of that performance back.

Nvidia's RTX Spark platform is designed to bring powerful AI capabilities to laptops. The MSI laptop tested by MindStudio supports up to 128GB of unified memory, allowing users to run large AI models directly on their devices instead of relying on cloud services.

However, MindStudio found that the laptop's AI performance varied dramatically depending on whether it was running Windows or Linux.

The performance gap showed up in other tests, too. Windows completed one AI workload in roughly eight minutes, while Linux took 37 minutes to finish the same task.

MindStudio initially considered whether overheating might be responsible, but temperatures stayed between 40 and 47 degrees Celsius.


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