Intel N95 CPU based systems are interesting

As many of you are no doubt aware, Intel has done away with the Celeron CPU designation. I believe that holds true for the Pentium CPUs as well, but not 100% certain on that point. The latest gen of low power CPUs carrying on from those CPUs are the "N" series of CPUs.

A friend of mine just got a Mini PC based on the new N95 CPU. This is an interesting little CPU. It's only a 15W part that has 4 cores with no hyperthreading. One of the really interesting things is that these cores are all 12th gen efficiency cores. Unlike the i5, i7, etc. there are no performance cores.

My friend tasked me with the initial setup of this machine, and I have to say that I'm impressed.

For $219 (US) he got a system with these specs:

The N95 CPU
16 GB DDR4 RAM
512 GB SATA M.2 SSD
4 x USB 2 Ports
2 x USB 3 Ports
1 x USB-C Port
1 x HDMI
1 x DVI
WiFi 5 with Bluetooth
2 x Gigabit Ethernet
1 x Headphone Jack
1 x Audio Out Jack
VESA Mounting Bracket
Has a 2.5" drive bay to accommodate an additional 2.5" HDD or SSD
Comes with Win 11 Pro preinstalled (the factory image has 22H2 with updates through Dec 13, 2022 installed, build 22621.963)
In this case, the model is an ACE Magician AD03, but other companies are shipping N95 based mini PCs as well.

For even less ($166) you can get the same thing but with 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD.

This little box seems to be surprisingly responsive. This seems to be a nice bump up from the Celeron based systems I have played with. I have a laptop with a 7th gen Intel i7 and this cheap little box mops the floor with it. I guess that those efficiency cores are actually pretty capable compared to the older tech.

I just thought that I would mention this for anyone looking for cheap systems for day-to-day activities. Seems like a pretty amazing value with very passable performance in my opinion.