Overhyped SBC or Insane Deal?? ZimaBoard Review

This rather futuristic looking thing is the ZimaBoard – an x86 mini PC with a few unique twists that make it an interesting option for at least a few niche groups. I should preface this review by saying that I have very mixed feelings towards this thing. On one hand it’s a reasonable bit of kit with a few genuine use cases, but on the other hand it’s an overhyped and under-delivering mess. I think they oversell this to such a degree that it annoys me, but I know a lot of people like this thing too, so I’ll do my best to be as balanced as possible. Right, let’s get into this.

IceWhale, the makers of the ZimaBoard, call this “the worlds first hackable single board server”, and sell this as basically a one click home server – everything from a “Personal NAS” and media server, to your home router and smart home controller. How they think this is “hackable”, I’m not sure. There’s no GPIO headers like a Raspberry PI, hell you can’t even overclock it, so the only “hackable” feature is the ability to install software, which.. Well.. that’s not exactly a unique feature. Something that is fairly unique for this sort of device is the PCIe x4 slot on the side – while it is only PCIe Gen 2, other SBCs generally opt for M.2 slots rather than PCIe slots. That means you can stick something like a quad port ethernet card in there and have this as a full router and switch. Speaking of ethernet, you’ve also got dual Gigabit NICs onboard, alongside two USB 3 ports, MiniDisplayPort and the DC barrel jack power input. Lastly on the other side you’ve got two SATA ports and a small header in the middle which is actually power for up to two drives. IceWhale includes a single power and data cable in the box, but they’ll sell you the dual version for just $3.90. Why they don’t just include that one in the box is beyond me.

Inside here you’ll find either a Celeron N3350 or N3450 depending on what model you opt for. I have the top end 832 model, which means I get the N3450 quad core and 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM. Regardless of the chip, you get 32GB of eMMC storage, and a 6W TDP – although in my testing the chip was reporting upwards of 13W of power consumption. The power adapter does 12V 3A, so 36W, meaning there’s enough juice to power the board, a basic PCIe card and two hard drives – but you won’t be powering things like graphics cards from this. 

With the tour out of the way, let’s talk about what this is meant to be for. IceWhale reckons this is the perfect plug-and-play personal server. From a hardware perspective I can see where they’re coming from. Dual gigabit ethernet means you can run OPNSense pretty well to act as your router, and the SATA ports mean you can run something like TrueNAS Scale as your NAS OS of choice, and then run stuff like Plex or JellyFin too. That makes some sense. The software side is something IceWhale has something for too – CasaOS. It’s not actually an operating system – it’s not even a Linux Distro – it’s basically a web server that makes setting up Docker containers fairly easy. There’s an “app store” where you can browse pre-configured containers, and one-click-install them. This is undeniably handy, although it’s worth pointing out that since it’s just a web server, this can be installed on basically any machine – it doesn’t have to be a ZimaBoard. It works on a Raspberry Pi, or a desktop PC running basically any Linux Distro you want. 

It’s also worth noting that my ZimaBoard came with CasaOS preinstalled, but equally pre-broken. I’d go to localhost or casaos.local, and all I’d get was the Apache initial install page. I tried running the uninstall command which didn’t do anything, and I tried running the install command, but again that would just freeze indefinitely, so as with all problems on Linux, I just reinstalled the operating system. I stuck Debian 12 on it, then ran the CasaOS install command. That finally did the trick and I could access the CasaOS web page. 

Let me show you that – it’s this NAS-like dashboard with an “app store” full of the pre-configured docker container configs. You just hit install and it gets everything pulled and running, then you can launch appropriate IP and port to access whatever you’ve installed. In this case I installed FileBrowser, a great file sharing and personal cloud solution. That works fine – both from the ZimaBoard itself, and from inside my local network. You can of course install any number of these – Plex or JellyFin I’m sure are popular options, plus WireGuard, PiHole and other private cloud tools like syncthings. It’s all pretty simple. CasaOS creates a folder in the root of your main drive called “DATA”, where by default it stores all your media, uploads and downloads from the containers. If you want to move that to another drive you’ll need to know how to mount a drive on Linux – with read and write permissions no less – then edit the Docker container config in the web UI to point it to your new mount point. Ah the joys of Linux. 

If you want to use this thing as a router as well, well that’s where it gets tricky. You’ll probably want to install something like Proxmox as the base layer, then install OPNSense to run the router side of things, and grab something like TrueNAS Scale to run the NAS functions. You could also go back to using Debian with CasaOS, but if you want good NAS functionality, TrueNAS would be a lot better. The ZimaBoard’s website includes a guide on the main page of how to turn the ZimaBoard into a router, and it says replace the OS with OpenWRT, so it’s clear they expect you to swap operating system to get whatever functionality you’re after.

Something that still confuses me is their suggestion that you might want multiple of these for different functions – the idea itself isn’t terrible, and the channel Raid Owl showed a cool high availability proxmox cluster demo I’ll link in the description – but I can’t help but feel that the form factor doesn’t really allow for it well. Unlike the Raspberry Pi, there’s no easy mounting solution here. The ports are all at the back, but if you have a PCIe card connected, it just sticks out the side. There’s actually no way to secure the two together – and what’s worse is the rear IO bracket needs to be removed as it clashes height wise, and with the Mini DisplayPort connection. So you have a PCIe card dangling around, sticking out the side. That’s not going to stack nicely. Then the two SATA ports – again where are you meant to put those? Under it I guess? But there’s no case, no chassis, it’d just be loose. How you’re meant to have multiple of these with drives and an add in card in any reasonable order is beyond me. Even the power supply isn’t great for having multiple. It’s a barrel jack – you can’t just split that up and use one power supply, you need multiple plug sockets and adapters. It’s not exactly a clean solution.

The thing that strikes me with the ZimaBoard is that.. I’d rather just buy a used thin client or small used business desktop for £50 on ebay and slap a few drives in it, some cheap DDR3, an SSD and a NIC or two. All of that would be less than this thing, it’d be an enclosed system, and it’d have more functionality and upgradability. This can’t be upgraded or repaired, a small desktop can. If I’m honest, I really didn’t understand this thing until I realised something. This is just a 2 bay NAS without the enclosure. Everything it’s promising is what prebuilt NAS units from the likes of QNAP or Synology already do, but this is a more DIY version. Admittedly, it’s considerably cheaper than a similarly specced 2 bay NAS, and a bit more hands-on software wise, so if you don’t mind the janky form factor, you are getting a pretty good value. It’s far from perfect – a better mounting system for the PCIe cards and an ecosystem of enclosures and mounting options would go a long way, but it’s hard to argue with the versatility it offers. Just for god sake stop marketing it like it’s a revolutionary, gaming changing, class leading bit of kit. It’s really not. It’s not a new idea, it’s just a desktop in a funky form factor. 

So in short, the ZimaBoard is a fairly unique, if overhyped, single board computer that’s well suited to essentially being a DIY 2 bay NAS, albeit missing a way to actually hold those drives, or the expansion cards you might want. It’s very competitively priced for the specs and IO, although if you don’t need the storage connectivity, a Pi is still a better, more cost effective solution. I’d still personally recommend a small used desktop instead, but if you want this janky form factor that badly, I don’t think it’s a bad shout.