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Oct 24, 2024

Raspberry Pi 5 vs Intel N100 mini PC comparison - Features, Benchmarks, and Price - CNX Software

The Raspberry Pi 5 Arm SBC is now powerful enough to challenge some Intel systems in terms of performance, while Intel has made the Intel Alder Lake-N family, notably the Intel Processor N100,

The Raspberry Pi 5 Arm SBC is now powerful enough to challenge some Intel systems in terms of performance, while Intel has made the Intel Alder Lake-N family, notably the Intel Processor N100, inexpensive and efficient enough to challenge Arm systems when it comes to price, form factor, and power consumption.

So we’ll try to match the Raspberry Pi 5 to typical Intel processor N100 mini PCs with a comparison of features/specifications, performance (benchmarks), and pricing with different use cases. That’s something I’ve been wanting to look into for a while but I was busy with reviews and other obligations (Hello, Mr. Taxman!), and this weekend I had some spare time to carry on the comparison.

I’ll start by comparing the specifications of a Raspberry Pi 5 against the ones for typical Intel Processor N100-based mini PCs also mentioning optional features that come at extra cost.

Some remarks:

The Raspberry Pi 5 was tested with Raspberry Pi OS Desktop 64-bit, and I selected the benchmark results for the GEEKOM Mini Air12 mini PC on Ubuntu 22.04. I haven’t run Geekbench 6 on my Raspberry Pi 5, so I took one of the results from the Geekbench 6 database for a Raspberry Pi 5 at stock (2.4 GHz) frequency. The storage read speed for the Raspberry Pi 5 was measured with a 128GB MAKERDISK NVMe SSD and the PCIe interface configured as PCIe Gen3 x1.

The Raspberry Pi 5 can be overclocked to get more performance, and some people managed to achieve 1,033 points (single-core) and 2146 points (multi-core) at 3.10 GHz, but it is still lower than on Intel Processor N100 mini PC, and may not work on all Raspberry Pi 5 boards.

The Intel N100-powered GEEKOM Mini Air12 is faster for most tasks, and in some cases up to almost three times as fast (Speedometer 2.0 in Firefox), except for memset (similar results) and OpenSSL AES-256 where the higher sustained single-core CPU frequency helps the Arm SBC.

This one will be tough as everybody has different requirements, local or import taxes, and so on. But I’ll first calculate the price of a minimum working system and the Raspberry Pi 5 equivalent of the MINIX Z100-0dB mini PC with 8GB RAM, a 256GB NVMe SSD, 2.5GbE, WiFi 6, and a fanless enclosure.

For the minimum working configuration, we’ll assume the user wants a Linux or Windows system that boots to the OS, and connects to the network and a display without any other specific requirements. The Raspberry Pi 5 4GB is good enough for this along with the active cooler, a 5V/5A power adapter (although 5V/3A might do too), and a microSD card. I also searched for the cheapest N100 mini PC I could find with storage and memory: the CHUWI Larkbox X (12GB RAM, 512GB SATA SSD) sold for $125.93 with free shipping on Aliexpress at the time of writing.

I tried to select low-cost items for the Raspberry Pi 5 and considered adding an enclosure unnecessary for the minimum configuration (it would add $5 to $20). Taxes and handling fees are not considered for either device, and the shipping fee is not included for the Raspberry Pi 5 kit which ends up being about $33 cheaper. The Larkbox X mini PC delivers higher performance and offers more memory, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and WiFi 6. The Raspberry Pi 5 remains the ideal candidate for use cases requiring GPIO, low power consumption, and a small size.

Now let’s switch to another user who will wonder “What year is this?!” when hearing or reading the words “gigabit Ethernet”, “WiFi 5”, “4GB RAM”, and/or “microSD card”. He won’t allow any noisy fan to pollute his room either, and he’d been fine with a fanless mini PC like the MINIX Z100-0dB with 8GB RAM that’s currently sold for $220.71 on Amazon excluding taxes with an 8% discount coupon selectable before order.

Let’s see what happens if we try to reproduce this setup with a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB. We’ll still need the 5V/5A power adapter and a micro HDMI cable, but we’ll replace the active cooler with a fanless metal case that can still take HAT expansion boards and the microSD card with an NVMe SSD with an M.2 PCIe Hat. We’ll need a WiFi 6 USB 3.0 dongle and a 2.5GbE USB 3.0 dongle, although HAT expansion boards could be daisy-chained to achieve the same result, but that would start to get messy and be more expensive.

The Raspberry Pi 5 system is still cheaper (by $20) before taking into account the shipping fees which may add up when purchasing from multiple vendors. The EDATEC fanless case is also hard to get as it’s not for sale on Aliexpress anymore, and finding another complete Raspberry Pi 5 case that takes a HAT+ expansion board is challenging. We’ve also created a monster with a HAT and all four USB ports would be used in a typical system with a USB keyboard, a USB mouse, and our two USB 3.0 dongles for WiFi 6 and 2.5GbE. In that specific use case, I’d consider the Raspberry Pi 5 to be undesirable, and people would be better served by a mini PC. I reckon I’ve pushed the requirements a bit far with WiFi 6 and 2.5GbE, as I’d expect many people would be fine the the built-in gigabit Ethernet and WiFi 5 connectivity, in which case the Pi 5 could still be considered.

As one would expect, there’s no simple answer to the question “Which is the best? A Raspberry Pi 5 SBC or an Intel N100 mini PC?” since it will depend on the user’s specific requirements. The Raspberry Pi SBC was first introduced as cheap hardware for the education market, and I would recommend the Raspberry Pi 4 over the Raspberry Pi 5 for this purpose since it’s cheaper and does the job. The Raspberry Pi 5 is more suitable for projects that require extra performance while keeping the small form factor, GPIO header, and camera connectors. Intel Processor N100 mini PCs offer a better performance/price ratio as a general-purpose computer running Windows 11 or a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, although you may potentially save a few dollars by using a Raspberry Pi 5.

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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