After testing IceWhale

ZimaBoard 2: 30-second review

IceWhale built its reputation on a simple idea: affordable, hackable x86 single-board servers for people who want to control their own data. The original ZimaBoard launched in 2021 on Kickstarter. Using an Intel Apollo Lake processor, it offered a level of expandability that the ARM-based cards that crowded the market at the time couldn’t match. Four years later, the company is back with the ZimaBoard 2, and the update is substantial in all the areas that matter most.

Added to this are faster LPDDR5x memory, an improved PCIe Gen 3 x4 slot, dual 2.5GbE networking, and the same passively cooled, all-aluminum chassis concept that made the first card so attractive to home lab builders.

Two variants are available at retail: the ZimaBoard 2 832 with 8 GB RAM and 32 GB eMMC, and the ZimaBoard 2 1664 with 16 GB RAM and 64 GB eMMC. Both come pre-installed with ZimaOS and support a wide range of alternative operating systems if you prefer something else.

While it’s possible to get N150 PC systems for less than the cheaper 832 model, these generally don’t offer a PCIe slot, so this hardware might be of interest to those developing an X4 slot-based solution. But it could also be useful, because it is passively cooled, to those creating integrated solutions, such as automated signage.

The ZimaBoard 2, like its predecessor, is a unique offering that isn’t expensive for the flexibility it offers. However, there are cheaper ways to get a small N150 system running TrueNAS or Proxmox, and a Raspberry Pi can run some of the applications, like Pi-Hole, that this system might otherwise be useful for.

I’m not sure this hardware is generic enough to be one of our best NAS devices for homes and small businesses, but some people will be attracted to what it has to offer.

ZimaBoard 2: Price and availability

• How much does it cost? From $279
• When was it released? Available now
• Where can you get it? Direct from IceWhale

There are two versions of the Zimaboard 2: a cheaper 832 model with 8GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage, and a slightly more expensive 1664 model with double the memory and storage. Since you can’t upgrade either memory or eMMC storage, it would be a good idea to choose wisely before purchasing either.

Direct from IceWhale, pricing is $279 for Model 832 and $349 for Model 1664, although shipping costs vary by location.

It’s possible to get it from an online retailer, such as Amazon, but the Model 1664 costs $399.90 in the US and £322.99 in the UK.

For those in Europe, the prices in euros are €238.62 and €298.49 respectively. Currently, the online store allows you to purchase from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea. All of these locations can be paid in either local currency or US dollars, with the curious exception of the UK, where payment can only be made in dollars.

That doesn’t sound expensive, until you compare those numbers to what you might pay for a mini PC.

For example, the GMK NucBox G3 Pro costs less, $259 on Amazon.com, which gets you an Intel Core i3-10110U (Beats 4300U/N150), 8GB DDR4, 256GB M.2 SATA storage, and includes WiFi and Bluetooth. Storage and memory are upgradeable and there is a second M.2 slot.

This comes from a well-known brand. But if you just want a mini PC or N150 NAS, then less than $200 is possible through Amazon, and even cheaper systems can be found on AliExpress.

Unless you want a specific feature of the ZimaBoard 2, like passive cooling or an external PCIe slot, cheaper options are available.

• Value: 3.5/5

ZimaBoard 2: specifications

ZimaBoard 2: Design

• All-metal construction
• Passively cooled
• PCIe 3.0×4 slot

Although I’ve seen some even smaller, the ZimaBoard 2 is tiny for an Intel X86 platform. At just 140 x 83 x 31mm, it fits comfortably in the palm of a hand, and the all-aluminum chassis that surrounds it does two jobs at once: protecting the electronics and acting as a radiator for internal heat. There are no fans, vents, or thermal paste to deal with. The board operates silently under all circumstances, which is either its most attractive feature or a cause for concern, depending on how much stress you plan to subject it to.

IceWhale has kept the layout practical. Ports are clearly labeled and the side PCIe 3.0 x4 slot is pre-cut to accept longer cards. A fan connector is present for those adding a PCIe card that heats up. The packaging has a nifty trick: the cardboard box is designed so that cutting out the lid converts it into a holder for the card and two 2.5-inch drives, which is a small but thoughtful touch for a product aimed squarely at budget-conscious builders.

However, from this reviewer’s perspective, hot electronics and cardboard don’t mix, and I recommend spending an extra $30 for the aluminum rack tray accessory that IceWhale offers.

It’s a bit of an exercise to mount the ZimaBoard 2 on this rack, but it makes the drives and any PCIe cards you connect feel much more secure and part of the system.

To reduce the amount of internal heat generated, this system does not have an internal power supply, opting instead for an external 12V wall plug power supply.

It’s good, because I was expecting an external power supply, but what I like less is the absence of a power button. If you shut it down, unless you have wake-on-LAN set up, the only way to restart it is to remove the PSU and then put it back into the socket.

The other obvious absence, onboard WiFi, is a deliberate omission rather than an oversight, I believe. IceWhale positions the PCIe slot as an expansion path for wireless, which reduces the cost of the base card but means an additional purchase for anyone who can’t use Ethernet. And, to be honest, WiFi seems like a poor use of location alone, considering its other uses.

As I’ll cover in more depth in this review, the PCIe slot is expected to do a lot of heavy lifting, perhaps beyond the practical point.

There is so much emphasis on the PCIe slot because the unit only has two USB ports. If you intend to connect a keyboard, mouse, and anything else USB, you’ll need a hub. There’s only a Mini DisplayPort video output, so IceWhale sells a cheap adapter that converts it to HDMI. Which begs the question: why didn’t they just use Mini HDMI and include a cable?

What you get are two 2.5GbE LAN ports, which can be channel-linked to send and receive up to 5Gbps over the network. This equates to approximately 600 MB/s transfer, which is faster than internal eMMC, a SATA-connected SSD, or a hard drive. The only way to saturate network bandwidth is to connect an NVMe using the PCIe slot.

However, the dual LAN setup could be extremely useful for those who want a hardware firewall or to run Pi-Hole to trap web ads before they reach network users.

In co Inclusion, it is an extremely compact and quiet design that consumes relatively little power and can be used interactively or as an integrated solution.

However, achieving these goals required making some specification sacrifices, which may or may not be the kind of compromise that’s right for you.

• Design: 3.5/5

ZimaBoard 2: Features

• Intel N150
• No internal upgrades
• Storage choice

The Intel N150 is a Twin Lake processor built on a refined version of Intel’s low-power architecture. Four cores running at up to 3.6GHz turbo, with a base power budget of 6W and 6MB of cache, represent a clear generational leap from ZimaBoard’s original Apollo Lake silicon, which was already aging when this product launched.

IceWhale’s claim of around three times the CPU performance is plausible on paper, and the move to LPDDR5x at 4,800MHz sharpens the memory bandwidth picture considerably.

That said, the N150 is clearly not a multi-VM workhorse. Four cores and four threads puts a real ceiling on anything involving multiple concurrent VMs, and those who push the card in this direction will find that it quickly reaches its limits under the combined workloads of GUI VMs. For single VM use cases, lightweight virtualization, Docker containers, Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Plex, Jellyfin, and general NAS tasks, the CPU is more than sufficient.

But the N150 was never a great experience for Windows, and installing that OS on the 64GB of eMMC storage could prove difficult. Using the M.2 expansion card could provide more space for a larger operating system and applications, but with only four cores at its disposal, this is a system worth being pragmatic rather than optimistic about.

Where this system is compromised, compared to a typical N150 mini PC, is that it offers no internal upgrades. The memory is soldered in place and the eMMC storage is also fixed. Yes, you can boot from external storage connected via the PCIe or USB slot, but the memory and storage present in the ZimaBoard 2 at the time of purchase is all it will ever have.

During my testing, I explored many potential configurations allowed by this design. These included using it without anything connected, using USB devices, and using PCIe cards. Since this hardware was reviewed alongside the ZimaCube 2, I was able to borrow a PCIe to NVMe card intended for the Zima Cube and put an NVMe drive in it, which worked well.

I also connected a 20TB Seagate IronWolf Pro, which also worked normally, and was able to format it in ZimaOS. The reason I mentioned this seemingly obvious success is that the IceWhale specs for this machine state that the maximum amount of SATA storage is 36TB from two drives, which by definition would be 18TB.

While I don’t have the drives necessary to test this claim, I suspect it would work with 24TB, 28TB, 30TB, 32TB, and even 34TB SATA drives. For the curious, the SATA interface, combined with 64-bit GPT (GUID Partition Table) partitioning, has a maximum theoretical capacity of 9.4 zettabytes ((9.4 times 10^9) TB). Going from 18 TB to 36 TB is therefore not a big step forward.

A bigger problem than just buying larger hard drives is that with constant use these drives will get hot, and even with the aluminum bracket there is no fan cooling to prevent overheating. It’s somewhat ironic that this is a passively cooled computer, but if you use it in certain arrangements you would be forced to add active cooling for the subcomponents, not the system. As part of the cradle kit, you get a small 25mm fan intended to help cool the electronics of a PCIe card. But that would hardly cool a hard drive or NVMe at all.

Any video card should work with only four PCIe lanes, have its own cooling, and if it needs more power than that provided by the PCIe slot, its own power supply.

Unless you’re looking for a modest GPU upgrade or to improve AI, the PCIe slot is probably better used for devices other than video cards.

• Features: 4/5

ZimaBoard 2: Software

• ZimaOS Plus
• Paid license level
• TrueNAS approved

ZimaOS comes pre-installed on the eMMC and boots directly to a web dashboard as soon as the card finds a network connection. IceWhale’s approach is to make the first-use NAS experience as seamless as possible, and it largely succeeds.

The dashboard provides access to an app store with over 370 one-click install apps covering media servers, backup tools, containers, smart home integrations, and more.

There is a minimalist aesthetic that is appealing and owners are guided through the careful installation of drives and applications.

The Zima Client companion app for Mac, PC, iOS and Android manages remote access and automatically selects the best available connection path. For users who want to go further, the full x86 platform means that TrueNAS, Proxmox, Debian, pfSense, OpenWrt, and even Windows are all valid options without any compatibility caveats. The ZimaOS Plus license costs $29 as a lifetime purchase and unlocks unlimited disk support and unlimited users beyond the free tier.

I mentioned this previously in my ZimaCube 2 review, and I would rather see the $29 fee bundled with the cost of the hardware rather than owners finding out when they try to add their second child. Debian is free, so if you want to understand the technical details of this operating system, you can exploit this hardware without additional investment.

• Software: 4/5

ZimaBoard 2: performance

• Expansion possibilities are limited
• Ambition versus reality

Where I see this platform most useful is as a Proxmox backup server or hardware firewall. In my opinion, you can’t connect enough storage to make it as useful as a NAS, although technically you could connect two very large hard drives and use them both if you’re willing to give up resiliency in the event of a disk failure. The alternative is to mirror the disks, thereby reducing the capacity by half.

It should be possible to connect an external RAID array via USB, but frankly, if you’re investing in equipment like that, then why not just buy a good four or six bay NAS, like the ZimaCube 2?

Networking reaches 2.5 GbE per port. For most home NAS scenarios, this is sufficient, but anyone wanting higher throughput will need to occupy the PCIe slot with a 10GbE card, which eliminates other potential uses for the slot. Thermal behavior under the passive chassis is worth monitoring closely during testing, as the aluminum body does all the work and installing a PCIe card will add heat to an already closed thermal loop.

Adding elements to this system is a bit like the game of whack-a-mole. Because you are upgrading the network to support 10GbE, but the storage is not fast enough to saturate it. So you use the M.2 card and have NVMe drives that can deliver the performance, but you’re back to a 2.5GbE LAN. A single Gen3 x4 slot isn’t enough to improve storage and networking, and there aren’t enough USB ports to use as a workaround.

For most people, they’ll eventually conclude that they need a rig with more PCIe lanes than the 9 that the N150 offers, because once all four are used in the slot and the other five allocated to the LAN and USB ports, there’s nothing left.

The next level of Intel hardware includes 20 lanes that mix Gen 4, providing the equivalent of 40 lanes of Gen 3, or more than four times the bandwidth. That’s why IceWhale used it in the ZimaCube 2, a system that costs more than double what the ZimaBoard 2 costs.

To summarize my thoughts on the ZimaBoard 2’s performance, any system running on passive cooling is not going to be extremely powerful. There is an old quote attributed to Dr. Samuel Johnson, the first dictionary author: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like the walking of a dog on its hind legs. It is not well done; but you are surprised to find that it is done.”

If we can ignore the Doctor’s misogyny and see the parallels with this hardware, the fact that he can run a VM or Docker containers is incredible, but don’t expect miracles when that’s the case.

Realistically, a single VM is all I would use, and I would limit it to a few Docker containers. Because, as efficient as Linux platforms can be, what’s under the hood of the ZimaBoard 2 isn’t going to break performance records anytime soon.

This is the compromise between the size of the ZimaBoard 2 and its passive cooling operation.

I limited my performance testing of the ZimaBoard 2 to copying large files to and from the NAS, using a 20GB video file as the brutal instrument of my assault. I had originally planned to use SSH and a client-based CLI to do more in-depth testing, but due to some issues I ended up just copying files over the network and locally to the NAS.

The ZimaOS client on the PC connects storage to specific virtual disks. So I was able to test the eMMC integrated storage, the 20 TB Seagate IronWolf Pro and the 1 TB Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 that I had connected via the PCIe slot.

All transfers used a single 2.5GbE LAN connection and were all managing 280MB/s when the transfers were initiated. However, it became apparent that when writing a file, most of the data was heading to the 16GB of RAM to be written to the storage device later. This was especially noticeable on the eMMC, as it was so slow that the system ran out of memory for the cache at around 17 GB, where it dropped significantly at around 60 MB/s.

Likewise, the hard drive made a noise in the middle of its write, stuck between the system cache and its own internal cache. Unsurprisingly, the best experience was on the NVMe drive, capable of writing the entire 20GB file at 280MB/s without missing a beat. I estimate that the NVMe drive is capable of reaching between 2000 and 3000 Mbps on a PCIe Gen 3×4 slot, but you can’t attach a 10GbE to provide some of that over the network, since you only have one slot.

I could have found another NVMe drive and ess have to move files between them, even though that would have cut performance in half, since one would be reading and the other writing.

A few users in the ZimaOS community have noted that if you use the GUI file manager, transfers seem to be capped at 600 MB/s, but CLI operations are not. I can’t confirm this and it may have been fixed later.

As with many NASes, the ZimaBoard 2 can become hamstrung trying to express its internal performance to external services. And these are limitations that owners will have to accept.

• Performance: 3.5/5

ZimaBoard 2: Final Verdict

The ZimaBoard 2 is a serious upgrade over the original in all the areas that counted against it: a faster processor, faster memory, faster networking, and a better PCIe slot.

At $279 for the base model, it’s in a competitive price range, but the combination of x86 compatibility, dual 2.5 GbE, passive cooling, and a true PCIe expansion path is difficult to replicate at this size and price. The soldered memory and external drive layout are trade-offs worth knowing about before buying, and the quad-core CPU imposes real limits on multi-VM ambitions.

For homelab builders, NAS enthusiasts, router experimenters, and anyone who wants a truly hackable, low-power server that can run almost any operating system without argument, the ZimaBoard 2 makes a compelling case.

Should you buy a ZimaBoard 2?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

For more NAS solutions, we’ve rounded up the best NAS hard drives around

Mark is an expert in 3D printers, drones and phones. It also covers storage, including SSDs, NAS drives, and portable hard drives. He started writing in 1986 and has contributed to, among others, MicroMart, PC Format, 3D World.

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