Intel's All E-Core N100 3.4GHz CPU Gets Benchmarked In GTA V And Other Games

In comparison to the Golden Cove and Raptor Cove P-cores featured on Intel's recent desktop CPUs, the Gracemont E-cores are downright puny. However, they're not slow processors in comparison to "CPUs in general." In fact, the per-clock integer performance of Gracemont is not far off of the Skylake core used in every Intel CPU from the 6th thru the 10th generations.


With that in mind, it comes as no surprise that the little Arc GPU built into the Intel Processor N100—an Alder Lake-N CPU with just four Gracemont cores—ends up being the bottleneck in video games rather than the tiny little processors. More accurately, it's probably the single-channel DDR5-4800, as these SoCs only have one 64-bit DDR5 interface. In any case, the system is both surprisingly-competent and also pathetically-slow, depending on your perspective.

We haven't tested an N100 ourselves, but YouTube channel Team Pandory got ahold of a Chuwi Gemibook XPro laptop using an N100 processor and put it through its paces in ten games. To summarize the gaming performance of the system, we would say it's similar or better in comparison to an Xbox 360. Fittingly, many of the games that Team Pandory tested date back to that era, including titles like Resident Evil 5, Skyrim, and GTA V.


The GemiBook XPro comes with an FHD 1080p screen, but Team Pandory wisely tested the games in 1280×720 "HD" resolution. We say "wisely" because the N100 only has a 64-bit LPDDR5 memory interface, and Chuwi didn't see fit to outfit the system with anything faster than standard 4800 MT/s—not that Intel officially supports anything faster on this SoC, anyway.


Most of the games hover around 30 FPS or worse, with Minecraft being the only title to be anything other than GPU-limited. Team Pandory has the Rivatuner Statistics Server overlay running in most games, and Minecraft is the only game that sees lower-than-95% GPU usage; the bottleneck in this case seems like it might be single-threaded CPU speed or perhaps simply memory bandwidth.

In every other game, the bottleneck is clearly the GPU, with the GPU usage slammed to the ceiling at 98-99% throughout the benchmark. The undemanding Resident Evil 5 is the best-performing game, although special mention has to be given to both 2014's Grid Autosport as well as 2013's GTA V; all three games are totally playable on the N100.


Meanwhile, Team Pandory tested Skyrim with the original DirectX 9 release from 2011; it runs extremely poorly, but we think this is down to Intel's graphics driver. Likewise, CS:GO could probably stick to 60FPS on this machine with a newer graphics driver than the April 2023 one used for testing. Sleeping Dogs is another game that struggles, but in this case, we think the game might just be too heavy for the little 24-EU (192 shader) Arc GPU.

It's a fascinating test of an interesting processor. We're talking about a chip that nominally has a 6-watt TDP, although in most of the benchmark tests in Team Pandory's video, the power draw reported by the chip itself is two-to-three times that value. Assuming that figure's accurate, this chip is soundly beaten in the same power envelope by the Aerith chip in Valve's Steam Deck. Heck, at 18W, AMD's Ryzen Z1 Extreme in the ROG Ally demolishes this system.

Even at 18W, though, being able to more-or-less match or beat the gaming performance of the 203-watt Xbox 360 is pretty cool. There's an absolute ton of excellent games from that era and before which would run just fine on the GemiBook XPro, and we're talking about a 14" laptop with a 1080p IPS screen for just $269. The march of progress is awesome.