World of Warcraft Classic and Retail on Intel i3-N305
Intel i3-N305 is a low-power, low-cost SoC for industrial and embedded applications. It can also be found in low-tier laptops and mini PCs. Even though it offers 8 E-cores the iGPU part is much smaller when compared to consumer i5/i7 and Ryzen parts. It's not intended for gaming, but still can (barely) run WoW on low settings.
I used a N305 network lab mini PC in this test. It was equipped with 32GB of RAM, and 512GB NVMe SSD with Windows 11. The TDP on this mini PC was set quite high while some low-end laptops can have a lower setting limiting the performance.
More demanding zones like player hubs will show some stutter. Simpler/older zones will run smoother.
When comparing to older data the N305 places below top SoCs of few generations back:
Mass combat in WoW is limited by single-core performance. N305 has good enough cores to get limited by the iGPU:
Windows 11 and WoW The War Within client was using 14,5 GB of RAM in total, some of that used as VRAM for the iGPU.
During benchmarks the SoC pulled up to 11-12W while having peaks of 16W power draw. The temperatures did not exceed 60C, well below the thermal throttling limit.
- FFXIV Dawntrail: 2512 (standard laptop preset)
- FFXIV Endwalker: 3699 (standard laptop preset)
FFXIV benchmarks at 1080p with the lowest preset runs at 20 FPS, sometimes hitting 30 FPS but not in an acceptable playable state. World of Warcraft with more options to cut down on GPU computing requirements offers a slightly better experience. WoW Classic seems to be running quite fine.
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