ACEMAGIC Kron Mini K5 Benchmarks: A $400 Wildcat Lake Box

What $400 Buys in a Wildcat Lake Mini PC

CNX Software published the second part of its ACEMAGIC Kron Mini K5 review on September 6, 2026, and it is the most complete set of numbers yet for Intel's Core 3 304 in a consumer mini PC. The short version: at $399.99 this is a competent Windows 11 Pro desktop with a genuinely useful NPU, and its limits are thermal and I/O rather than raw compute.

• Silicon: Intel Core 3 304, five cores (1 P-core + 4 E-cores), 1.5 GHz base and up to 4.3 GHz, with Intel Xe3 graphics and a 15 TOPS Intel AI Boost NPU
• Configuration as tested: 12GB of soldered LPDDR5-5600, a 512GB NVMe SSD, 2.5GbE, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4
• Benchmarks: 5,309 in PCMark 10, 1,729 single-core and 5,027 multi-core in Cinebench R23, 1,880 in 3DMark Fire Strike, and 26,212 on Geekbench AI NPU (quantized)
• Power: 3.7–4.3W at idle, 12.5–15.9W playing 8K60 YouTube, and 29.7–33.0W under sustained Cinebench load

Single-Core Performance Is the Story

A 1,729 Cinebench R23 single-core score is the number that makes this machine feel quick in ordinary use. That is comfortably in modern-desktop territory, and it is why the reviewer describes general Windows 11 Pro work and 4K/8K video playback as smooth. The 5,027 multi-core result is what you would expect from one performance core and four efficiency cores — fine for compiling small projects or running a handful of containers, not a render node.

The NPU result is the more interesting data point for anyone shopping this class of machine for edge AI. Geekbench AI's quantized NPU score of 26,212 against 11,787 for the GPU shows the AI Boost block doing real work, and 15 TOPS is enough for background inference tasks — local transcription, small vision models, on-device assistants — without pulling the CPU into it. That is the same argument we made when the MINIX N304-AI brought Wildcat Lake and a 15-TOPS NPU to a budget mini PC in June, and the Kron K5 confirms it with a fuller benchmark set.

Where Does the Kron Mini K5 Run Out of Road?

Two places, and both are worth knowing before you buy.

The first is thermal. Under 3DMark Fire Strike the package reached roughly 90°C with E-core throttling, and Cinebench R23 pushed it to about 92°C with all-core throttling. Power limits are set at PL1 22W, PL2 35W and PL4 60W, but the reviewer's conclusion is that the machine hits thermal limits before it hits power limits. Performance stayed competitive with other Core 3 304 systems, so this is not a broken cooler — it is a small chassis doing what small chassis do. Fan noise tracks it: 37.4–38.0 dBA at idle rising to 45.7–47.0 dBA under sustained load, which the review notes is louder than some rivals.

The second is I/O and memory. You get six USB 3.2 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Type-C, HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4, plus 2.5GbE that measured a solid 2.37 Gbps in both directions. What you do not get is Thunderbolt 4 or 10GbE, and the 12GB of LPDDR5-5600 is soldered — lower capacity and lower bandwidth than several competitors in this bracket. For a homelab node or a NAS front end, the missing 10GbE is the constraint that matters most.

Who Is This Mini PC Actually For?

It is a good fit for a quiet secondary desktop, a media box that will genuinely handle 8K playback, a kiosk or signage machine, or a small edge-AI node where 15 TOPS and sub-5W idle draw are the point. Wi-Fi 6 measured 838 Mbps down and 830 Mbps up, which is fine for a machine you will probably wire anyway.

It is a poor fit if you plan to run local LLMs of any size — 12GB soldered and no expansion path closes that door — or if you need high-speed storage networking. For those jobs, the Wildcat Lake SBC and mini PC roundups in our mini computers section have better-provisioned options, and the Beelink EQ Mini and EQi families cover the same Core 3 304 silicon in configurations with more headroom.

Sources: CNX Software — ACEMAGIC Kron Mini K5 Review Part 2 — September 6, 2026; CNX Software — Kron Mini K5 Review Part 1: specifications, unboxing and teardown — August 29, 2026; VideoCardz — 2026.