Meet the Intel i3-N305 and it’s eight performance cores

Serve The Home was very excited to announce the Alder Lake-N i3-N305 and it has eight 3.80GHz E-cores, brand new Intel UHD graphics and a top TDP of 15W. The first system they tested is the Beelink EQ12 Pro, which packs the aforementioned processor, 16GB 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, one headphone port, two 2.5 GbE ports and two HDMI ports, as well as a 1×1 WiFi card.

The performance, compared to a desktop computer is not terribly impressive, however when compared to previous generation SFF systems, the Beelink EQ12 Pro is rather incredible. It easily outperforms systems currently on the market and does so with significantly lower power consumption. Highest consumption recorded on Serve The Home was around 36W, sustained total system load was around 26W, although idle is a bit higher than some of the other tiny boxxen tested.

Had some challenges with activating Windows and locating drivers, but Beelink was quick to respond and resolve everything. It retails for less than $400 and can do almost anything a full-sized system can do, except AAA games of course. See it in detail here.