Clear Linux On The OnLogic Karbon 700 Boosted Performance By 13% Over Ubuntu With 141 Benchmarks

Last month we reviewed the OnLogic Karbon 700 as a passively-cooled, industrial-grade PC powered by an eight-core / sixteen-thread Intel Xeon, 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe storage, and a plethora of connectivity options in suiting to industrial use-cases. The performance was great and even the thermal performance was very good for being a fan-less PC. In seeing how well other Linux distributions were panning out on the Karbon 700, I tested five popular Linux distributions on the Xeon Coffee Lake system and once again Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux squeezed out much more performance potential.

The OnLogic Karbon 700 as we had it as a review sample was configured with the Intel Xeon E-2278GEL CPU with 8 cores / 16 threads and UHD Graphics 630, 16GB of RAM, 512GB Toshiba NVMe solid-state storage, and all housed within its metal rugged PC chassis. More details on the device can be found via OnLogic.com along with other configuration options.

On this rugged industrial PC I tested Ubuntu 19.10, Clear Linux 31530, Fedora Workstation 31, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Debian 10.1 for seeing how these various Linux distributions performed and if any compatibility issues came about. Across all these distributions, the Intel Coffee Lake hardware was working fine out-of-the-box with no compatibility problems to note around the Karbon 700.

Of course, on each of these Linux distributions I ran a variety of benchmarks with the Phoronix Test Suite in being curious about the performance potential for this fan-less 16-thread computer.