This is a multi-part blog looking at a Raspberry Pi 5 running Linux.

This article benchmarks a Raspberry Pi 5 (16GB RAM) against a DreamQuest N100 Mini PC. The Pi 5 is running Raspberry Pi OS (Debian based) whereas the N100 is running Ubuntu 25.04. The tests are run using the Phoronix Test Suite.

What’s the rationale of benchmarking the Pi 5 against an N100? Simple! This series is looking at using the Pi 5 as a desktop machine, and the N100 is a hugely popular Intel processor found in many low-cost mini PCs. The Pi 5 was provided by SunFounder.

Normally when I benchmark a machine, I look at benchmarks that focus on system performance, processor, memory/graphics, disk/WiFi. But the Pi 5 doesn’t come with a disk. Testing things like disk performance therefore seems inappropriate. An earlier article in this series provides disk benchmarks booting the Pi 5 from a microSD, and an NVMe SSD over PCIe. With the latter, I get better disk performance than many low cost mini PCs with an SSD.

I’ll just focus on processor and memory benchmarks.

Processor benchmarks

The Raspberry Pi 5 features a 2.4 GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A76 CPU, a VideoCore VII GPU, an in-house designed I/O controller, a power button, and a real-time clock (requires external battery).

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt

Smallpt is a C++ global illumination renderer written in less than 100 lines of code. Global illumination is done via unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing and there is multi-threading support via the OpenMP library.

The Pi 5 actually beats the N100 in this test. A great result.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark compress-pbzip2

This test measures the time needed to compress a file (a .tar package of the Linux kernel source code) using BZIP2 compression.

In this benchmark the N100 wins hands down.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark stockfish

I wanted to benchmark with Crafty, but it’s not available in the Phoronix Suite for the ARM architecture. Instead I’ll use Stockfish, an advanced open-source high performance and scalable C++ chess benchmark.

The N100 whips the Pi 5 by a country mile. I still lose every game against Stockfish on the Pi though!

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark x265

The Pi 5 does much better in this test but still falls behind. But both results are pretty terrible.

x265 Video Encoding 4K

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark x265

The margin is much less here. Again both results are nothing to write home about.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark

Coremark is a benchmark that measures the performance of central processing units (CPU) used in embedded systems.

The Pi 5 puts in a good performance here.

Memory Benchmarks

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark ramspeed

Both machines have single channel memory and DDR4 RAM.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark ramspeed

Summary

The Pi5’s CPU has a CPU mark of 2698 compared to the N100’s 5401. As shown, in some benchmarks the Pi 5 runs the N100 fairly close.

All articles in this series: