Advances in Mini PCs have been notable, but more and more enthusiasts are also asking for greater flexibility in designs. That usually translates into the ability to install an external graphics card, and thus we arrive at the new LattePanda Mu N305, an upgrade of the previous Nu N100 model, now equipped with an eight-core Intel Core i3-N305 processor. If we add a Primer Carrier with a PCI Express x4 slot to that configuration, a whole new dimension in graphics performance opens up.
At the end of November we talked about the Compute Module 5, the latest version of the module based on the Raspberry Pi 5, with drop-in backward compatibility and triple the performance. That sounds great for those who have bet on the Raspberry ecosystem, but the truth is that there are more powerful alternatives in similar formats. Not going too far, the people at LattePanda offer the Mu N100 module, which according to their own benchmarks is twice as fast as a Raspberry Pi 5 in multi-thread applications. Now, it's the turn of the LattePanda Mu N305, a direct upgrade with a much more powerful chip.
LattePanda Mu N305: Eight x86 cores in a single module
Thanks to the latest video shared by ETA PRIME on YouTube, we can confirm that the LattePanda Mu N305 uses an Intel Core Mobile i3-N305 processor with eight cores and eight threads. In addition to doubling the number of cores compared to the N100, this chip has a higher base and Turbo frequency (1.8/3.8 vs. 0.8/3.4 GHz), double the L2 cache (4096 vs. 2048 KB), and better specifications in the Xe graphics, with the detail that it almost triples its TDP (15W vs. 6W)
That last aspect is very important, since ETA PRIME removed the stock limit set at 15 watts, and configured it to 32 watts with the help of ThrotteStop (although in practice it goes to about 28 watts). If the user can cover the additional thermal demand, the i3-N305 essentially increases its performance by 50 percent, and combined with a graphics card like the GeForce RTX 4060, it responds wonderfully in demanding games at the level of Spider-Man Remastered and Cyberpunk 2077 (with more than 60 FPS in 1080p High and DLSS on Balanced).
Even with the extra cost of the base (39 dollars on average), I think there is great potential here, and ETA PRIME's next experiments will probably be based on Linux and SteamOS.
