Minisforum used Computex to show off the N4, a 4-bay network-attached storage box built around Intel's new Wildcat Lake silicon. It slots in below the AMD-based N5 family the company has been rolling out since last summer, and signals that the next wave of self-hosted storage hardware is moving toward hybrid-core x86 designs that idle cheaply when nothing is happening.
The processor is a 6-core part with 2 Performance cores and 4 Low-Power Efficient cores, a 15-35W configurable TDP, dual-core integrated graphics, and a 17 TOPS NPU. That last figure is the interesting one for a NAS: it is enough headroom to run object detection in Frigate, face and scene recognition in Immich, or small quantized models locally without leaning on a discrete GPU. The Linux-side driver work for Wildcat Lake's NPU has largely landed: the IVPU kernel driver added Wildcat Lake support before Computex, Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.32 completed the user-space stack in April 2026, and OpenVINO 2026 ships with improved NPU handling for Core Ultra systems including ahead-of-time compilation that removes the dependency on OEM driver updates. NPU inference requires kernel 6.6 or newer. That said, all of this is SoC-level support, and end-to-end device validation on the N4 itself will depend on community testing once the hardware ships.
The chassis is all-metal with four 3.5 inch drive bays and two M.2 slots wired for PCIe 4.0 x1 SSDs, which is plenty for cache or metadata duty but not for full NVMe pools. Networking is the standout, with a 10 Gigabit port alongside a 2.5 Gigabit port, WiFi 7, a USB4 port, two USB Type-A ports (one USB 3.x and one USB 2.0), and HDMI out. A hands-on from NAS Compares puts the RAM ceiling at 16GB of soldered LPDDR, since Wildcat Lake is single-channel only and rules out SODIMM upgrades regardless of the board design.
The spec sheet reads like a TrueNAS Scale or Unraid target rather than a Synology competitor: ECC is off the table at this tier, but a 10GbE uplink, USB4 for external expansion, and an NPU for inference make it a credible all-in-one for a Proxmox or OpenMediaVault homelab. Pricing and an exact release window have not been announced, and the N4 sits in a broader Minisforum lineup that now includes the Strix Halo-powered N5 Max and the fanless SSD-only S5 and S7 built on Intel Panther Lake.
