Weibu N10 Review – An OEM Mini PC tested with Ubuntu 22.04, Windows 11

Weibu is a B2B company offering total solutions and OEM/ODM services. Their target clients are computer manufacturers like Acer and Hisense as they don’t sell directly to end users. With their products both the specifications and accessories can be customized according to their customer’s requirements.

One of their product lines is mini PCs and they have sent a pre-production sample of their N10 design to showcase their capabilities. In this review, I will look at the various options available for the N10 and briefly look at performance running both Windows and Ubuntu.

Weibu N10 hardware overview

The key selling feature of this mini PC is the wide range of ports suitable for commercial/industrial usage together with various options for the processor.

The N10 is an actively cooled mini PC and the device is 145 x 128 x 54mm (5.71 x 5.04 x 2.13 inches) large with a metal top that extends over as the front and back to form the case which is then completed with two plastic sides and bottom:

CPUs that are supported include Intel’s Coffee Lake i5-8259U or i5-8279U, Comet Lake Celeron 5205U or 5305U, and Comet Lake i3-10110U or i5-10210U. The review sample included a Comet Lake Pentium 5205U which is a two-core 2-thread (no HyperThreading) 1.90 GHz Core processor (no Turbo) with Intel’s UHD Graphics.

The front panel has a power button, double dual USB 3.0 ports (i.e. four in total), a reset pin-hole for the UEFI (BIOS), dual COM ports (which are optional), a Type-C USB port, both a 3.5mm microphone and a 3.5mm headphone jack and a micro-SD card slot:

The rear panel includes the power jack, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, either a VGA port (as in the case of the review sample) or a DisplayPort 2.0, an HDMI 1.4 port, dual USB 2.0 ports, and a Kensington security slot:

Internally, there is an M.2 2230 WiFi 5 (or 802.11ac) Intel AC7265 card, and either an M.2 2242 or 2280 ‘M’ key SSD drive (the review sample included a 256GB Foresee M.2 2280 SATA SSD drive):

Also, there is the ability to add a 2.5” SATA drive to the top of the case which is then connected to the motherboard via a conventional SATA cable and a separate power cable. If the N10 is configured with the dual COM ports they are connected to the motherboard by ribbon cables:

There are also two SODIMM memory slots and the review sample included a single stick of Foresee 8 GB DDR4 2666 MHz memory running at 2400 MHz:

The specifications state:

and lists the front USB ports as 3.0 and the rear USB ports as 2.0 so I tested them together with the Type-C USB port using a Samsung 980 PRO PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD housed in a ‘USB to M.2 NVMe adapter’ (ORICO M2PAC3-G20 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure) which confirmed that all the ‘blue’ USB ports were USB 3.0 (USB 3.2 Gen 1×1 i.e. 5 Gbit/s):

and that the ‘black’ rear USB ports were USB 2.0:

However, the Type-C USB port currently has a design flaw in that the physical port is recessed into the front panel of the device and this can prevent cables from connecting due to the outer casing of a cable being larger than the recess:

By removing the front plastic insert I could access the Type-C USB port without hindrance to the cable but being a pre-production sample the port was only a USB 2.0 without ‘video output’:

Another drawback of being a pre-production sample was that the microSD card reader was not connected and so could not be tested.

Review Methodology

When reviewing mini PCs, I typically look at their performance under both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu). I now review using Windows 11 version 22H2 and Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS. I test with a selection of commonly used Windows benchmarks and/or equivalents for Linux together with Thomas Kaiser’s ‘sbc-bench’ which is a small set of different CPU performance tests focusing on server performance when run on Ubuntu. On Ubuntu, I also compile the v5.15 Linux kernel using the default config as a test of performance using a real-world scenario.

Prior to benchmarking, I perform all necessary installations and updates to run the latest version of the OS. I also capture some basic details of the device for each OS.

Installation Issues

When booting Ubuntu 22.04.1 there are a couple of error messages being reported in the ‘dmesg’ although the significance of which has not been determined:

Windows Performance on Weibu N10

The Weibu N10 came installed with an unlicensed copy of Windows 11 version 22H2 as it is expected that customers needing Windows will purchase or have their own Windows keys. After applying updates Windows was build 22621.675. A quick look at the hardware information shows it is aligned to the specification:

A brief check showed working audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet.

I then set the power mode to ‘High performance’ and ran some of my standard set of benchmarking tools to look at performance under Windows:

I also tested Cinebench R23:

Ubuntu 22.04 performance

After shrinking the Windows partition in half and creating a new partition I installed Ubuntu as dual boot using an Ubuntu 22.04.1 ISO. After installation and updates, a brief check showed working audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet.

The key hardware information under Ubuntu 22.04.1 is as follows:

I then set the CPU Scaling Governor to ‘performance’ and ran some of my Linux benchmarks:

I also ran PassMark PerformanceTest Linux:

which can be directly compared to the results from when it was run on Windows:

Video playback in browsers with YouTube

As the review sample did not have a particularly powerful processor/graphics combination I concentrated on evaluating how well the browsers functioned. To do this I played some videos in Edge and Chrome on Windows and in Firefox and Chrome on Ubuntu:

Basically, browsers on Windows performed better than on Ubuntu when playing higher resolution videos with Chrome being the best browser on each OS:

Thermals

The Weibu N10 mini PC uses active cooling and underneath the motherboard above the bottom of the device is a large fan:

Running a stress test on Ubuntu saw the CPU temperature climb to an average of 45°C occasionally peaking at 46°C:

During the stress test, the maximum temperature I recorded on the top of the device was around 30.5°C in an ambient room temperature of 21.6°C and the fan was virtually silent, registering only 30.5 dBA on my sound meter next to the device during the test. If the CPU frequency is monitored when running the stress test it can be seen that it ran at a constant 1900 MHz both before, during and after the test:

Networking

Network connectivity throughput was measured on Ubuntu using ‘iperf3’:

which showed both good and consistent Ethernet performance on both ports.

Power consumption

The power consumption was measured as follows:

• Powered off (shutdown) – 1.3 Watts
• UEFI (BIOS) – 10.2 Watts
• GRUB boot menu – 9.9 Watts
• Idle – 7.5 Watts (Windows) and 6.3 Watts (Ubuntu)
• CPU stressed* – 13.9 Watts (Windows ‘Cinebench’) and 11.9 Watts (Ubuntu ‘stress’)

*The power figures fluctuate due to the fan so the value is the average of the median high and median low power readings.

Final Observations

The N10 has a good range of ports suitable for many commercial/industrial usage scenarios. Whilst performance from the review sample was somewhat impacted by the choice of CPU and amount of memory, it shows the capability of the device when low power usage is a critical factor. The ability to both customize the port selection and CPU choice offers plenty of flexibility to prospective customers.

I’d like to thank Weibu for providing the N10 mini PC for review. Further details can be found on their website.

Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium)

Ian is interested in mini PCs and helps with reviews of mini PCs running Windows, Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter.

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