Specifications
We interrogated the system running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, a hugely popular Linux distribution.
Processor
The DreamQuest N95 Mini PC hosts an Intel N95, a processor that falls in the mobile segment. Launched in the first quarter of 2023, it has 4 efficient cores (without hyperthreading). For its class, it’s a well respected processor.
The DreamQuest PC was running under very light load when the image below was taken. As you can see, all of the cores are running at 800MHz, the lowest frequency. for this chip
The Intel N95 has a CPU Mark score of 5,378. To put that into context, that’s a rating slightly lower than the Intel i5-6500 desktop processor. The N95 has a frugal TDP of 15W, whereas the i5-6500 is a stonking 65W. But the TDP of a processor is not necessarily indicative of a PC’s power consumption. We’ll test power consumption in a later article to be published shortly.
We’ll be benchmarking the N95 against other processors in the next article in this series. For now, here’s a chart comparing the N95 with some other very low power processors using the CPU Mark benchmark. The processors below are often found in Mini PCs and NAS devices. The N95 wipes the floor against them.
Hardware virtualization is available on the N95, which greatly improves virtual machine performance.
Graphics
The N95 provides onboard Intel UHD Graphics. The DreamQuest can run 3 4K monitors at 60Hz with its HDMI ports.
Due to the single channel memory, low clock speeds, and low shader count, the gaming performance of the iGPU is extremely limited. Alder Lake-N was never designed as a gaming platform though, instead targeting lower-level tasks like web browsing, video playback, and basic office work.
Disk
For storage, the DreamQuest hosts a KingDian M2 2280 SATA 1TB SSD.
1TB will be more than ample for the vast majority of users. Maximum read and write speeds are quoted by the manufacturer as 560 MB/s and 520 MB/s respectively which is consistent with a standard SATA SSD. We’ll benchmark the disk with KDiskMark in the next article in this series.
Memory
It would be easy to misinterpret inxi’s output here. The N95 processor only has a single-channel memory interface.
Our machine has 32GB of RAM which is very large for mini PCs. There’s also a model with 16GB of RAM available.
Audio
Bluetooth
There’s support for Bluetooth 4.2 which works out of the box in Ubuntu.
Network
For networking we have WiFi5 2.4/5.0 as well as 2 RJ45 ethernet ports. The WiFi5 performance seems typical at the price point of the mini PC, but we’ll investigate this more deeply in the next article in this series. Both wired and wireless work out of the box in Ubuntu.
Temperature
The temperature reading was taken with the machine under light load. It’s slightly on the high side but it was taken on a warm Summer day.
Summary
Besides Ubuntu, we also tested other distributions on the machine including Manjaro, Fedora, openSUSE, and Debian. All of the DreamQuest’s hardware runs flawlessly under these Linux distros without any additional drivers needed.
In the next article in this series, we’ll put the DreamQuest mini PC through benchmarks.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – Specifications
Complete list of articles in this series:
| DreamQuest N95 Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | Introduction to the series with an interrogation of the system |
| Part 2 | Benchmarking the DreamQuest N95 Mini PC |
| Part 3 | Power Consumption and Running Costs |