ZimaBoard 2 Review – THE ULTIMATE HOME SERVER

FINALLY! This is the ZimaBoard 2, and unlike the first generation, I’m in love with this thing. There are only fairly subtle changes, but it’s enough to take it from an interesting option, to what might just be the ultimate single-board home server. This is what I’ve been waiting for, so let’s dive in so I can explain exactly why I’m so excited about this thing!

Much like IceWhale, the makers of the ZimaBoard, I’m going to mostly be comparing the two generations, or at least using the first one for context. I’ll start with possibly the biggest change, which is that the CPU is now an Intel N150, a quad e-core chip with a 10W TDP, which they say is three times faster than the N3450 that came in the two higher end models of the original ZimaBoard. That’s quite the upgrade! As for RAM, that is now either 8GB of LPDDR5x 4800MHz, or like mine here, 16GB. As for storage, that is either 32GB with the 8GB RAM model, or double at 64GB when you get 16GB of RAM. One of the biggest upgrades switching to that newer, faster CPU though is actually the IO. The PCIe 4x slot on the side now runs at Gen 3, up from just Gen 2 on the original ZimaBoard, and even more so the two ethernet jacks are now actually BOTH 2.5G. That’s a huge upgrade! You of course still get the two SATA 6Gbps ports on the back, and two USB 3.1 ports, plus a Mini DisplayPort 1.4 port too. 

Physically there isn’t too much different, subtle styling and heatsink fin changes, an added little fan header should your PCIe card need a bit of airflow, but it’s otherwise pretty similar. The thing that changed at least for me is that they included the $30 optional extra hard drive cage this time. This is an absolute game-changer for an otherwise clunky and awkward format. Sure, you could use the top of the box as a stand for the ZimaBoard and two 2.5 inch SSDs, but it’s still janky. This though? This gives you a way to use two hard drives, and gives you a nice and secure (and compact) place to put a PCIe card, and gives you a cute little stand for the ZimaBoard! This, to me, is a must-have accessory, and makes this whole thing feel a lot more polished and premium. 

As for the preinstalled operating system… well that’s where the differences really show up. Instead of “CasaOS”, which was just Debian with a web UI, this comes with ZimaOS. ZimaOS feels functionally identical to pre-built NAS operating systems from the likes of QNAP, Synology, or UGREEN. It’s slick, super simple to set up, and gives you an app store with 372 apps that, for the most part, are one-click-installs. It’s smooth and seamless. It is so much more polished. Setting up storage – after rebooting once to clear the OS locking one of the drives for some stupid reason – was done in a couple of clicks, and installing programs up to and including Ollama and Open WebUI was super simple. 

For those wondering, yes, you can run LLMs even on the CPU here. The 16GB of RAM actually means you can run like 7 or 14 billion parameter models, although you’ll probably want to stick to 1-3 billion if you want any amount of tokens per second. Even Gemma3 4b was pretty slow, so yeah, if running LLMs locally is what you’re after, this absolutely can. It pegs the CPU to like 17 watts – a fair bit higher than the 10W claimed TDP – which long term does heat the CPU a fair bit, but hey, if you want it, it can, even without an AI accelerator card.

The fun thing about the ZimaBoard though is that while it does make a pretty excellent little two bay NAS, especially with its polished pre-installed OS, you can absolutely install any OS you want on it, and do anything you like to it. And the exciting part for me about the ZimaBoard 2 specifically is that there is finally enough horsepower (and RAM) to actually use it for stuff. You absolutely can install Proxmox as the base OS, and virtualise everything else – OpenSense, and Home Assistant, and TrueNAS, and anything else you want to run. There’s (just about) enough horsepower here to actually do that, and that’s really cool. This gets me excited for what you can do with this thing as a homelab in a box basically. 

The biggest catch with basically any product though is always the price tag, and I’m afraid this one is no different. The ZimaBoard 2 STARTS at $20 more than the last one, at $220, with this 16GB version another $80 more at $300. Add in the hard drive cage at $30 and you’re looking at the same price as a decent 2 bay NAS. Except this has PCIe, and a wealth of customisations available to it that a locked down NAS doesn’t. The dual NICs – even before thinking about adding more via PCIe – is already an exceptional feature allowing you to either use it as a router and firewall, or with port trunking for double the throughput (plus redundancy), and is something a lot of NASes don’t have access to. It’s also possible to just use it as a mini desktop PC – you probably shouldn’t, it isn’t exactly top notch for that, but you absolutely can if you really want to! 

If you want to compare it the other way, to the most popular single board computers on earth, the Pi 5, this has significantly more horsepower, 4 PCIe 3 lanes versus 1 PCIe 2 lane, dual 2.5G LAN, and two SATA ports built in. This is a much, much more capable server. Sure, you are missing the pin IO which on the Pi offers a wealth of options from dual mic arrays to servo motor drivers, but the joy of this being an actual computer is you could grab a Pi 3 or 4 and hook it up as an accessory to this, and then you get the best of both worlds for relatively little extra cash. The point is, if you want a small but well featured single board server that can actually do everything you’d want, this is an amazing choice, and especially with today’s RAM crisis, an extra $100 over the last gen for double the RAM and storage, let alone 3x the CPU horsepower, I think is a pretty decent deal. Great job IceWhale!