Picking a CPU for a NAS or homelab server is mostly guesswork. Vendor spec sheets tell you core counts and boost clocks, but they don't tell you how an i3-12100T actually compares to a Ryzen 7 8840U for the kind of always-on, mixed workloads a home server runs. So I started collecting real CoreMark scores from real devices and put them on a public leaderboard: 17NAS.
Every score is submitted by a device owner and human-reviewed before it lands on the chart. Here's what a few hundred submissions taught me.
The top isn't who you'd expect
The current leader is the AMD EPYC 7513 (32C/64T) at 1,140,363, followed by the EPYC 7532 at 1,024,710. No surprise there — server silicon wins raw throughput. But scroll down and it gets interesting.
Efficiency is the real homelab story
Nobody runs a 280W EPYC in their closet. The interesting rows are the low-TDP parts:
- Ryzen 7 8840U (8C/16T, ~28W): 379,594 — beats a desktop i5-11500 (267,917) while sipping power
- i5-13500TE (35W): 436,649 — the "T tax" barely dents it
- i3-12100T (35W): 175,087 — for a pure file server, this is all you need
If you're building today, the used-market sweet spot is last-gen mobile/handheld silicon, not old Xeons. A Xeon E5-2650 v4 still scores a respectable 584,273, but at 105W TDP and DDR4 platform costs, the efficiency math rarely works out anymore.
ARM is knocking
The Apple M4 (ARMv9, 4P+6E) sits at 292,013 — roughly matching a desktop i9-13900H-class part in this benchmark. And the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 shows up at 177,452. Neither is a NAS chip today, but the trajectory is obvious: ARM efficiency is coming for the low-power server segment, and it's worth watching.
Why CoreMark and not Geekbench?
CoreMark is small, deterministic, and runs on everything from a router SoC to an EPYC — which matters when your dataset spans x86, ARM, and whatever people have lying around. It's not a perfect proxy for NAS workloads (no I/O component), but as a pure CPU comparison across architectures, it's the most apples-to-apples number available.
The tools around it
The leaderboard is the core, but I also built two browser-based network tools that homelab folks keep asking for:
- IPv6 connectivity test — checks whether your network actually has working v6, not just what your ISP claims
- NAT type detection — figures out your NAT behavior, which matters if you're trying to reach your NAS remotely
Both run entirely in the browser, no signup.
Run your own and submit
If you have a NAS, mini PC, or old server, run CoreMark and submit your score — the chart gets more useful with every submission, especially for the oddball ARM boards and mini-PC chips that reviewers never benchmark.
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