I’m impressed that it even produces frames per second, as opposed to seconds per frame. FSR, Fidelity, and DLSS are a Godsend. This is a really neat machine, thanks for sharing.
Well not DLSS because Nvidia decided to be assholes and made it a proprietary feature only available to their RTX cards, whereas FSR is available for every GPU out there. But yeah, upscaling technology in general is a huge game changer.
@@StrixWar The difference is miniscule and you wouldn't even notice when playing a game unless you specifically look for it and the FPS increase is exactly the same. There's really no reason it should be a proprietary software. Nvidia just likes to bullshit about how DLSS requires specific hardware.
This chip consumes 6W, its performance / power is straight up incredible. It might not be viable as a desktop, but as a low power x86 server, it'll do just fine.
I'm thinking whether AMD has any APUs in that uber-low power draw segment today. Anything with Vega graphics even with single channel could be better. I'm loving this tiny CPU anyway.
shows you how hopelessly lost the market is now. its like the pentium 4 days all over again. pumping more and more power and more GHZ only gets you so far
There's also a new chip named Intel Core i3-N300 which is a 8c/8t cpu, clock up to 3.80ghz but it is the first 8 core i3 cpu ever I think. The igpu instead of 24EU 750mhz like in N100, the i3 N300 has an igpu with 32EU 1250mhz, should deliver significantly more performance. What's weird to me is that both cpus support only single channel ram.
I remember way back in the day about this one guy who ran a blog trying to create the most efficient PC possible at the time. It's funny that the 3550 and 3770 were mentioned since he used a 3570k processor and went all the way down to 4w of total system power. It was by no means a good pc, but the fact that it even got some rendering done was incredible. That's also not mentioning how he had to rip off multiple components of the motherboard taking up "unnecessary power"
This didn't sound familiar until the removing components part. I forgot the processor and whatnot but remembered the desoldering stuff. This was a strange era of PC modding due to how hot and loud they got. At the time Silent PC Review guys were cutting holes in their cases with tin snips for air flow and suspending platter hard drives with rubber bands to damper their vibration. Even fans had mods because fan control wasn't there yet.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Sure. But back then there were few options. The breakout Antec P180 case that introduced concepts that are now common was a product of collaboration with Silent PC Review.
I think it would be cool if you tested some 2D and Isometric games using this, like Hades, Battle Brothers, Vamp. Survivors. This machine would shine playing simple games at full HD rather than demanding games at very low res.
Yeah, I don’t think anyway is expecting much from this playing Cyberpunk but 2d indie games should be fine, right? And testing emulation would be interesting as well depending on the console.
$240 w/8GB, $260 w/16GB. 24 EUs Intel UHD graphics. Dual 2.5GbE ports. This would make for an incredible DIY pfSense router or even a tiny Plex transcoding server. I'd love to see how well it emulates games and if it can handle full speed Mupen64+ Parallel emulation, specifically.
You'd still be better off buying a 6 year old tiny Lenovo business machine with a 15 watt processor, except maybe for the games... but still, don't expect too much from the 24EU iGPUs...
@@Quast That's gonna depend on need. As a pfSense router, the dual 2.5GbE ports and low power consumption are killer. As a Plex transcoding server, the UHD IGP is actually amazing thanks to Quick Sync advancements. Likewise, as a HTPC, this thing has AV1 hardware decode which is insane. The N100 single core performance is within 5% of an i3-7100T and Ryzen 2200G while operating around 6W. As with most IGP/APU setups, performance is going to vary depending on single vs. dual and DDR4 vs DDR5, but it's clearly the weakest link in this machine for any new games.
@@nathanddrews Yeah, I should have been more specific, I was thinking more in the direction of the i5 Intel CPUs.... 12/13th gen we entered territory where I would start to find a i3 acceptable. But if you need 2x 2,5GbE then probably there is barely another choice.
@@Quast I'm starting to see those SFF office PCs selling under $150 with 8th and 9th gen i5 CPUs. Combined with an RTX A2000, you're not going to get a better mini gaming rig, that's for sure!
@@nathanddrews I mean, p/p relatively new used workstation graphics cards aren't yet there where I would like to see them. But for sure, that will only take another 2-4 years till that changes!
This little machine is obviously meant to be some kind of homeserver with it's low power cpu and dual Ethernet ports, really impressive to see what it can pull off outside of that scenario
Not sure if it's that impressive considering the Athlon 3000G is already a few years old. It obviously has much lower TDP than the Athlon, but it also shows in the percent lows which are just awful here
@@xPandamon I wouldnt give too much of a crap about the TDP. If I took the Athlon and tweaked the firmware to 0.8 Ghz base clock the TDP would probably also be in that realm. The base clock determines the TDP, when boosting this chip will most certainly take more than 6W, but the assumption behind "low power" CPUs like this is that they will only boost for momentary spikes in workload and then go back to essentially idling, because in many cases cooling and power delivery is simply unable to keep up with the CPUs power demand and heat output for more than a few seconds. But a low TDP makes the spec sheet look juicy for laptop manufacturers, even if its highly theoretical.
@@builder396 obviously moving to a newer manufacturing process increases efficiency by a lot, so what you said is straight-up wrong. TDP *can* be misleading, but not in the way you described.
I remember when I got my first Pentium 133 Mhz PC and thinking it was amazing. Not long after 166 MMX came out and I so wanted that. By the time P2 233 came along I was like I need a way to get one of these. Its a nice one here that this little system starts out at 800 Mhz - very old school !
Well, my first PC was based on 25mHz 386 and few years later my Pentium III reached 800 mHz. So yeah... i really can't see what's the point of this utterly confusing processor. I have i5 4460 lying in drawer which is probably better than this.
@@RudolfSikorsky in terms of latency probably, but likely not lightyears ahead in actual throughput. he's running this jank on the integrated graphics and holding even this little fella back. It's trippy how much IPC has advanced. That being said, my 2500K is my go-to for a gpu test bench.
Let's be honest,this CPU will probably only sit at 800mhz if it just idles with nothing in the background. It's most likely turbo boosting to do anything
Thanks for including the Cinebench result. Seeing this match a desktop Ivy Bridge i5 really surprised me and brought home how usable this modern day Atom actually is.
It used to be so that you only had to watch out not to get a Atom, Celeron or pentium if you wanted a reasonably fast computer, but now we have the ‘Intel Processor’
I looked at the spec sheet preparing for the worst, but, nope, they didn't cheap out on the NICs. They're 2.5 Gbps. I'm in the market for something like this and it's really ticking the right boxes. Even has WiFi for a potential all-in-one solution. Price isn't bad at all for what it is, especially if you've shopped the devices that usually come up in these conversations like those from Netgate and Ubiquiti. Looks ideal for the Proxmox + OPNSense + PiHole kind of thing.
Yeah, it was my initial thought as well. The USP is clearly the dual NICS along with the very low power draw. I have a tiny PC similar to this one and it draws around 3 watt at idle/doing network stuff.
For a basic email or light web surfing box it does pretty well. May have a .8 Ghz base speed but turbos up to over 4 times that! I'm not surprised that Intel is dropping the Pentium and Celeron branding. The Pentium brand has basically stood only for entry level ever since the Core 2 days in the mid to late 2000s. Celeron has basically stood for just barely usable since the Pentium 4 days. Sure, both names were once used in legendary products, but not for many years.
Don't think they can hold the boost clock for too long. Depending on the cooling used in some models you can hope for a couple seconds of max. GHz. Usually you topping out due to the thermal restraints.
using this pc as a minecraft server right now, even with 8 people on it, it works beautifully! hovering around 75-85% cpu useage and using only 12 watts, amazing little thing to run 24/7!
Thank you for including a comparison for old architectures. Manufacturers always boast about IPC and efficiency gains compared to previous generation, but seeing that this cute thing almost beats an old i7 is just mental.
This is the gaming phone future because the higher end core i3 n300 has 8 cores and has similar performance to snapdragon 8 gen 2 while consuming 4 watts less, they could used that 4 watts to inprove further ipgu performance, they could put iris xe from the 9w cpu (eg: i7 1250U) in and it’s the perfect cpu for mobile
I don't know how but its somehow blurry and pixelated at the same time, normally the blur makes it hard to see the pixels but I can see both. Now thats an achievement....
Modern and Celeron and Pentium branding was associated with utter trash that would chug the moment it encountered anything more demanding than Google Chrome. Ditching the negative branding was a decent move IMO
@@steph_on_yt I personally always associated Celeron with embedded CPUs used for servers like pfsense and pihole due to their extremely low power consumption. Pentium was always an office-grade CPU in my head. However I think that we can all agree that "Intel Processor" is utter garbage of a brand name. Yeah no shit its an Intel processor, so are the units from the Core and Xeon lineups.
@@mr.dingleberry4882 the new naming is bland, boring, and vague. Welcome to the future. Rumor has it that the next iPhones will just be called... the iPhone. Go figure.
Pentium (from Greek pente meaning 5) just fancy name Intel gave 5th gen x86 cpus after the relatively boring 8086, 286, 386, 486 naming convention. Pentium had extreme mindshare in the 90s. So extreme it lasted 30 years haha
actually seems like a good deal, my dad still uses some old handmeown 2010 office pc he got for free from his job and it takes like 5 min to even just turn on but seeing this thing can play games like that even if they look like shit is pretty impressive and its only like $250
Nice little machine. I am a little sad however that Intel is dropping the Pentium / Celeron brand naming. I guess I'm just old and remember them since the start of my computing days lol
@@steph_on_yt I get what you are saying but "Intel Processor" is certainly not a better brand name. Its generic, obvious and potentially confusing, as all fuckin processors from Intel are "Intel processors"
@@steph_on_yt I think that rationale would make no sense though. People are at least familiar with Pentium and Celeron and they segmented the products properly. Btw I had not realized until now that I replied to the same person in two different comments lol
I have the predecessor processor, Celeron N5105. It runs up to PSP/3DS emulation. Won´t run PS2/Gamecube and any newer console. But retroarch and old 8-16-32 bits systems runs prefectly fine.
What a terrifying first impression of a base clock speed… and it does significantly better than the laptop Celeron processor I used to own could every hope to.
I've been really curious about this CPU, I was thinking about buying one of these just to play around with. This is much better performance than I expected. It would be nice to see it USB-C powered rather than taking a wall wart but that's a minor complaint.
Just so you know it's very very low end. It can barely run W11, it's not very stable with this OS. I'm probably converting mine into a router due to the 2x2.5G NICs.
@@Phambleton Good to know. I generally build a custom ISO so I can strip most of the bloat from Windows installs and that helps a lot with CPU and RAM requirements but with Microsoft positioning themselves to go to a subscription for Windows I'm giving Linux another look. I don't care for Linux but I think the writing is on the wall.
@@406Steven So the EQ12 has a few Wi-Fi driver related issues on Ubuntu. The Intel AX101 driver doesn't exist yet for this platform, and I've tried using a USB Realtek Wifi dongle but no luck. There might be a future update on Beelink's page but it's not something to rely on. However, the dual 2.5G ethernet ports work great! It seems a device like this is optimised to be used as a router/VPN/firewall - perhaps using Proxmox then making a pfsense VM
Eta Prime made an emulation test with a mini PC (MoreFine M9) that uses the same N100 and it seemed to emulate the PS2 decently enough, it was running at 60fps with 2x scale. That mini PC uses DDR4 though, this one could be able to get some slightly better performance in emulators that are GPU-bound, like in CEMU, so it would be interesting to see some tests.
This machine would be the perfect homelab base. NVMe for IO intense stuffs, 2.5" for mass storage with a laptop HDD, 4 cores, fast rams, more than enough, but expensive.
It's definitely helpful that it's DDR5 memory, but it's only 4800mhz and single chanel, so it's still slow for vram. The lack of hyperthreading and the similarity to ivy bridge performance per core also makes me think these are pretty similar to the E cores in the bigger chips. It's been interesting recently seeing x86 chips attempt to reach ARM efficiency. This seems like it's practically an Atom CPU.
tbf most modern processors especially lower-end ones downclock to that frequency when it's not under load anyway, hence why Intel simply markets the N100 as running at up to 3.4GHz without listing the base clock.
slight correction, intels statement on the celeron and pentium CPUs was specifically in regards to Laptops, the desktop cpu lines are unaffected. for now...
This system has a cpu that clocks at a speed equivalent to speeds of higher end cpus from years ago, running at a wattage a tenth or a fifteenth of the power of most cpus, with RAM faster than most PCs and a size that I can fit in my pocket but barely. What an insane system, but can get easily redundant
I remember the good ol' 2015 days i used to own an HD 6450 pushing 40-ish FPS on 720p in GTA 5. Nowadays you grab this tiny little PC box that holds an iGPU doing the same. I don't even wanna talk about ryzens iGPUs. It's amazing to see all this progress quite fast!
Cinebench R20 scores may suggest near i7 3770 performance but the gaming benchmarks with GTA V pegging the CPU at 100% all the time kinda make me think this CPU has some limitations that aren't exposed by Cinebench. I used to play GTA V in 2015 on a Phenom II X4 at 1080p 30-40fps low and that thing wasn't always hitting 100% usage.
These are essentially modern Atom cores. No HT, reduced cache and ISA. They work great for parallelized workloads, but you'll probably want full-size P-cores for gaming and single-threaded applications
I wanted a new web browser/video viewer to replace my current Lenovo laptop that's crapping out. This will fit perfectly with the low power/performance ratio.
Thank you for reviewing dirt-cheap products like that. For around 250€ in my country, this little thing is absolutely not ridiculous! Sure on the second-hand market, you may have something more powerful with a dedicated GPU... But the size and power consumption of this puppy is awesome! My GF who is not a gamer and just needs access to email and Word for remote working might even enjoy a little bit of light game to indy stuff (like life is Strange, and a few super cool narrative games that do not need power horse to run). Cool little PC!
For desktop use and light gaming this is still pretty oversized. I'm doing most of my daily tasks on an old Core 2 Quad machine, that is noticeably slower. And the only reason I need a quad in it is because streams can be surprisingly demanding.
Systems such as these were not meant to be running any type of triple a title and instead are meant to be in office cubicles, bank desks, management offices in retail/restaurants All while being a part of a larger domain group performing tasks such as logging into that domain, emails, conferencing. Not every system sold is a gaming PC
The N95 20w @ 1.7 ghz from beelink should perform much better for $20 more if that. I saw one for $150. It should be maybe 20% faster than the N100 just because of the higher power draw beelink allows
as someone who uses the i7 3770k sure the benchmarks are around the same as this little beast real world performance shows that the hyperthreading pulls it ahead alot but i might buy one of these just because of the fact that it can rival old i5s
Efficiency is surely good, but it needs that turbo boost to even reach the minimum specs for any Windows of the last 15 years. Performance is pretty good for something that small. Considering that is basically a quad of the Alder Lake efficiency cores, that is quite impressive. And those Skyrim results show that it can run games up to maybe 2010 good enough. Would clearly benefit from a stronger iGPU. The CPU part is strong enough, and depending on how the power management between the parts is balance, that little thing could be even better.
They say it has 25% better benchmarks than it´s predecessor, the Celeron N5105. I own a N5105 and I can handle daily tasks easily. I use MSoffice, GIMP, Davinci Resolve, and internet. The computer runs smoothly and runs 4k videos. I use it with 2 FullHD Ultrawide monitors. As for games, I run more than 400 indie games on Steam perfectly, not to mention emulation till 3DS/PSP. It can´t handle PS2/GameCube but it is an awesome retroemulation station with retroarch. Games that I handle with no problem: Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, CupHead, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and new vegas, into the breach, final fantasy 1 till 10 (X-X2), Starcraft remastered, Command and Conquer remastered, Age of empires 2 HD, Age of Mythology,, Dead cells, and every visual novel and adventure point and click possible.
Thanks for the N100 review. I have a few of these mini PCs with 6 Watt 4-core Celeron and Pentium N3000 Apollo Lake and N4000 Gemini Lake series, and they are geat. They consume almost nothing: At full load, my 4-core N3450 Celeron mini PC consumes 12 Watt maximum at the power outlet. 🙂 I mainly let them do scientific work for the World Community Grid project, to find cures for diseases. And they do finish work units rather quickly. I am also going to miss the Pentium and Celeron brands... but if I'm right the lowest end of the Core-I series are also called Pentium and Celeron.
i could see these being used for things like cheap bolt-in office PCs, HTPC applications (with things like Steam Link or Limelight added for in-home streaming from your main rig in another room from the den). good cheap family school/work pc for sure.
I have the Alder lake based Pentium G7400 in my living room computer that is for the family. It might be the last Pentium ever since they since have stopped using the name. I proudly put the Pentium sticker that came with the CPU on the case. I think it is amazing how it can use only 20W at max and the entire computer only is cooled by a 80mm case fan and the free CPU cooler and yet it never gets even close to hot. It is about as powerful as an i5 from a decade ago.
In fact, it looks like the Pentium G7400 ought to edge out both an i5-7600 and i3-9100, so we're only talking *6 years* ago. Extrapolating from my experience with the i3-12100 (which by itself handily beats an i7-7700K), package power should come close to 30 W in the worst-case scenario of Prime95 small FFTs - which is still not much in the grand scheme of things, of course. You should be seeing sub-1 W idle package power, otherwise check whether C-States and ASPM are all enabled.
It's really neat that this chip can handle these games at all with such little power draw. Jeez though, the graphics looked like a mess with those low settings.
It has a TDP of 6 watts which does not directly translate to power consumption. Not saying its not a low consumer, no doubt that it is, its just probably not 6 watts exactly.
please test this cpu a bit more, with a varity of older games pre 2015 i think this is a very interresting cpu, The N200 and N300's are looking very Interresting too with the slightly better gpu, for esports and older games they might suit perfectly
Just amazing. That thing is an Xbox 360 on steroids and it's not even a gaming oriented machine either by specs or form factor. I imagine it might even run emulators up to Dreamcast or PSP.
