How Does Strix Halo Stack Up on Linux? Feat. GMK Tec

I've got one special just for the Linux users because I've had such a fun time wricks Halo on the desktop uh courtesy of GMK. And if you saw the review, I did a review of this 128 gig stricks Halo platform. And a lot of you said, well, I would be happy with just a normal mini PC. And I'm an AI enthusiast, but I'm not really like diehard AI. And the relatively I mean for AI stuff the 128 GB configuration in an AI context is very inexpensive. It is one of the most inexpensive ways to get a platform that can run models that need 128 gigabytes of capacity in a graphics computation context. At the same time, you know, at the time that I'm doing this video, that's about $2,000 US. And so some of you said, "What about the 64 gig model?" And I said, "Okayy doy. [Music] So, it's a few weeks later and I've got quite a bit more mileage with these. And in case you're not familiar, this is not a normal mini PC in the context of the sea of mini PCs that are out there. When you order this from GMK Techch, it comes in a box like this. And inside is this, a power brick, a power cord, and an HDMI cable, and that's pretty much it. But this is um a an advanced version of the system on chip. Most of these mini PCs do have built-in graphics, but the built-in graphics here, the APU that AMD has put together in Stricks Halo is as powerful as a discrete GPU. It's up to the level of about a 4060M, like a mobile version of a 4060 from Nvidia. And the memory in here is shared between the operating system, like the normal system memory, and the GPU. And so, for that reason, it's hard for me to recommend the 32 GB configuration over a normal mini PC. But what you get when you choose this over a regular mini PC is that it has twice as much memory bandwidth available on the graphics side of things. And so the system tends to feel a little bit more snappy, a little bit more more responsive. The Zen cores don't necessarily have uh full access to that, but some optimized software is able to use GPU routines to request information be loaded that way and then the information is available to the Zen cores. So depending on how optimized your software is, you may have options. And that brings me to why this is on this channel, the Linux channel. If I could sum it up, like it's been a delightful experience. And it's I don't it's really tough for me to use words to articulate how exciting this is because I've been about the year of the Linux desktop for a really really long time now. And if you've not experienced the reality of not the year of the Linux desktop, if you use a modern DRO with these could be Arch to be anything with a relatively recent kernel, recent Mesa versions, you can get there with Ubuntu, but it's more work than it should be. If you use Linux on this and you use it earnestly and you have a good window manager and you have a good setup, this feels like the year of the Linux desktop. The one weird thing between the 64 and 128 gig versions, the Windows sticker. I don't remember. I guess you can order it without the operating system. One of them came with Windows and one of them didn't. That's fine. You know, you're on this channel, you don't want Windows anyway, or if you do, you want it as a virtual machine. Now, the 64 GB version also comes with a 1 TB SSD, but it is super easy to change and upgrade the SSD. There's also two NVME slots internally, so you could add a second NVME if you want, or you can go totally off-road and add an NVMe to Oculink breakout adapter, drill a hole in the back of the computer, and add a PCIe slot. If you're new here, we have videos like that on this channel. Hello and welcome. Okay, bottom line, GMK Jack has juiced this thing to the max. This is a chip that is meant for laptops and in a laptop configuration it will burst to a higher wattage but then it'll back off. GMK Techch has a configuration here that'll run at like 140 watts and that is the number one complaint with this that I see in our forum and from other users that just saw this and knew they wanted it because Stricks Halo. It uses higher wattage and it has a great cooling solution and it's stable at the higher wattage. It's a credit to AMD's engineering, but that also makes it noisier. If you run it at 110 or 120 watts, which you can configure through the BIOS, it is going to be uh much more silent. And I think within the realm of a normal person's expectations of the noise of a machine that's sitting on their desk, if you have a setup like this with a monitor and you just put it behind the monitor, you might not even notice it notice the noise um at 140 watts. But I think the 120 watt configuration is more in lines with the acoustic expectations of somebody that's using this machine, especially in normal everyday use, especially with an LLM running in the background and especially when you game. Cuz when you game, the fans will ramp a little bit. And I find the slightly lower wattage configuration to be much more acoustically pleasing, but your mileage may vary. But hey, the BIOS is fully unlocked, so you can do a lot of really cool stuff with the BIOS. And we did a full BIOS tour in our other video, so I don't really feel the need to revisit that. But just the highlights are that you have TDP control and you have some control over uh the platform itself. You have some control if you do the the Oculink breakout from the M.2. There is some features in the BIOS to let you control and address that. There's also fan and RGB control, and you can turn the RGB off cuz if this machine's running 24/7 and you don't want it to emit any light whatsoever, that's an option for you in in the configuration. If you really need me to make you a DRO recommendation for this platform, Stricks Halo that is kind of easy and straightforward but also bleeding edge, Cashios or Basite, those are both great options for this. You basically just be off and running with Steam pretty much immediately. Um there is a combined launcher that'll let you bring in good old games and and other things like that and give you direct access to Proton. It is a first class Linux experience with one of those dros. Uh Ubuntu 25.04 4 is also perfectly serviceable on this platform. The most recent installer as of the beginning, I think it was the beginning of August 2025, um has a lot of updates and quality of life improvements for this platform. And so again, out of the box performance, Linux pretty pretty amazing and you'll be gaming at near performance parody with Windows. Now, now Microsoft has noticed that and they've made a lot of improvements since Windows 24 or Windows 11 24 H2 launched. There's still kind of a lot of bugs in Windows, but it is near performance parody in Linux between Windows. And I can't believe that I'm saying that, and I'm only cvetcheting just a little tiny bit there on the whole Linux versus Windows. It is it is shockingly good how close they are in par um for performance. Now, if you're if you're shackled to the Microsoft ecosystem for work, like you have to use Teams and Office and whatever, the web versions of that basically work fine. You can install Edge on this. I'm so sorry. I'm so so sorry. and have a reasonably good experience running Edge Chromium VS Codium building this as a platform. It's great. There's also a new up andcoming, not really up and cominging DRO, but like if you want to experiment with like the bleeding edge stuff on Linux and understand how Linux is built different and like get a taste of how Linux is built different, you should check out Omari. It's from the guy that did 37 Signals and Base Camp. Smart dude, very opinionated. The DRO also very opinionated. a lot of choices have been made for you. But that is sort of Linux. It's like you're spoiled for choice. And that's actually like a whole other psychology thing. It's like, oh, if we have three flavors of ice cream to choose from, it's magical. But if you have 74 choices of ice cream, it's very bad. Linux is like that. There's 74 choices. There's actually probably like 963 choices. But Omari and gives you some of the it's like you're going to think about window management different and shortcut keys and you're going to discover some things about oh it turns out I can actually use the computer really productively if you have that kind of a mindset and so that's a lot of fun you know side quest with this thing but again first class Linux experience shockingly good especially with a strict Halo platform let's take a look at benchmarks now for the benchmarks we'll start with games and starting with Borderlands 1080p are two GMK tech configurations options and the framework desktop. I thought I'd throw the framework desktop in because hey, strict Halo configuration. Why not? Why not? And with 1440p preset, it holds the same. This is one of the tests that made me think that maybe I had the TDP settings incorrect or that the BIOS defaults were different between the machines, but it doesn't happen in every game. It's just a couple of games. For example, Clare Obscure 1080p medium preset. It's basically identical performance across all three systems. And that was true even at 1440p with a medium preset. Cyberpunk runs particularly well on this platform. The 128 and the 64 GB platform both work great here. I didn't have a chance to test the uh framework desktop for Cyberpunk because there was an update, but you know, over 100 FPS at 1080p, not bad. 84 FPS at 1440p on the high preset. And this is how I would probably play the game. DSX Mankind Divided, there's really not a huge difference between the 64 and the 128 GB configuration. and stepping it up to 1440p. You still have a perfectly playable 69 FPS. Final Fantasy Dawn Trail 97 FPS. It does fall a little behind our framework desktop and our 128 gig configuration, but again, it's not a huge difference. At 1440p, things line up a little closer. 63 versus 66 FPS, but still very, very playable and very responsive. Monster Hunter Wilds at 1080p, 72 FPS, and 63 FPS at 1440p. Very, very respectable scores. Keep in mind this is just there's no discrete GPU. It's just it's just what's on the CPU. Older titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, yeah, over 100 FPS no matter what you do. 119 FPS and 83 FPS. Very very nice. For Cabbage 2024, just to give you an idea like just to just a sanity check on Windows 1746 versus 1862. And for a single core scores, it's basically identical across the board. 113, 113, 114. and some of the benchmarks just to keep apples to apples. Yes, a little bit of a Windows configuration, but I was surprised at some of the performance differences between the 64 and 128 gig configuration. At first, I actually thought that I'd mess something up in the BIOS cuz, you know, I've been playing with the power settings and there really shouldn't be that much of a difference, a performance difference between the 64 and the 128 GB configuration. You also have options in BIOS for configuring the, you know, how much memory is reserved for the GPU. Generally, you don't really need to reserve a lot of memory for the GPU anymore with modern kernels. Like, the games are able to just use what they need on the platform. So, you can get by with the GPU having only a half a gigabyte allocated to it, which again is amazing. And a lot of the AI software is updated to take that into account as well. And so, the GPU can still access the rest of the memory. It just doesn't pre-allocate for it. And so if you want to run even things like LM Studio on Linux, kind of the easy mode option, it'll give you the Vulcan backend and then you'll you'll be able to run this. If you want to go off-road, there's Rockom and there's the Rock Dro. And I would definitely recommend you check it out. And in 64 gigs, you can still do a lot. You can't run a 70 billion parameter model the way that you can on the 128 GB configuration, but you can run a 30 billion parameter model and still have a lot of room left over. And so with that model, if you're doing coding and you want to do coding offline, you can get a reasonable 10 to 25 token uh per second experience on a model that's about 30 billion parameters in a in a Q8. Now, you could run a 70 billion parameter uh AI if it's a Q4. They're only four bits, so instead of taking 70 GB of memory, it'll be about 35. You'll have enough room for that. And so you can still do a lot with AI, and it's a fun AI experiment thing. and it cost $500 less. You know, $500 for 64 gigabytes of memory. That's a really big ask. But again, if you are doing AI workloads and everything else, it's a steal. So, it's a little bit one or the other. But also, I explain all that to help you choose because you can get a really inexpensive mini PC has DDR5 sodoms and it will cost significantly less and it will perform really, really well. Uh, but the APU is not there. Like what you lose is gaming and like 1080p 60fps at like medium medium high settings. Again, it's about the same as a 4060M. That's really what you're buying. Although, you can do Oculink with this. And so, you could move even beyond 4060 level performance or have some sort of unholy AI abomination where you can run CUDA, Rockom, and Vulcan all on the same platform, Open CL, all on the same platform. And that is a lot of fun for computer scientists and researchers and and that sort of thing. If you're, you know, if you're a first or second year college student, computer science, that is a good way to give yourself access to the all all of the popular stuff that's going on right now. Definitely, uh, you know, familiarize yourself with CUDA, but you should also, you know, don't sleep on Rockom either. It's just what I'm saying. So, I'm going to This is level one. This has been a quick look at the GMK tech from a Linux experience from actually having used this thing for a few weeks now. And I can't I mean the thing that makes me excited is that this really does feel like the year of the Linux desktop. And I love that. I I love that because the next generation of hardware like the next generation of APUs are probably going to have this performance level and it's going to be a whole different ballgame in terms of like price configuration and everything else. And that is really really exciting. So if you pick up one of these or you want to share stories in the forum, you know, hit us up, join us. I'm Willless Level One. I'm signing out and I'll see you there. [Music]

Strix Halo, AMD's new-ish APU, is pretty neat! But how is it on Linux? Let's check it out! ********************************** Thanks for watching our videos! If you want more, check us out online at the following places: + Website: http://level1techs.com/ + Forums: http://forum.level1techs.com/ + Store: http://store.level1techs.com/ + Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/level1 + L1 Twitter: https://twitter.com/level1techs + Wendell Twitter: https://twitter.com/tekwendell *IMPORTANT* Any email lacking “level1techs.com” should be ignored and immediately reported to Queries@level1techs.com.