Meet The Intel i3-N305 And It’s Eight Efficiency Cores
Serve The Home were quite excited by the announcement of the Alder Lake-N i3-N305 and it’s eight 3.80 GHz E-cores, brand new Intel UHD graphics and a top TDP of 15W. The first system they got to test is the Beelink EQ12 Pro, containing the aforementioned processor, 16GB of DDR5 and a PCIe 3.0 1x 512GB NVMe SSD. Externally the 4.9″ x 4.4″ x 1.5″ SFF system offers three USB 3 Type-A ports, one Type-C, a headset port, dual 2.5GbE ports and two HDMI ports, as well as a 1×1 WiFi card.
The performance, when compared to a desktop is not terribly impressive, however when it is compared to previous generation SFF systems, the Beelink EQ12 Pro is rather incredible. It easily outperforms systems currently on the market and does so at a significantly lower power draw. The highest consumption Serve The Home recorded was around 36W, sustained total system load was around 26W, though it does idle a bit higher than some of the other tiny boxxen they have tested.
They did have some challenges with Windows activation and tracking down drivers, but Beelink were fast to reply and resolve everything. It sells for under $400 and can do just about anything a full sized system can do, apart from AAA gaming of course. Check it out in detail here.
