This is a ZimaBoard from IceWhale Technology.
They're calling it the world's first hackable single board server.
I'm calling it the answer to the question: what would happen if your server had an affair
with a Raspberry Pi?
Welcome back to the Pro Tech Show.
Disclosure bit first: I didn't buy this, they sent it to me;
but there were no conditions attached, no money changed hands, it was speculation on
their part, this video is not sponsored.
This video is a review and I do not accept payment for reviews.
Stop asking. You know who you are.
So what is the ZimaBoard?
Well... it's a computer.
A small, passively cooled computer that can be used by itself or as the brain for a DIY
project.
What makes this interesting is they haven't gone down the route of an ARM-based platform
like the Raspberry Pi and its various clones.
Under this heatsink is a full-fat quad-core Intel x86 processor.
It began as a Kickstarter but having smashed its funding target it is now in full production.
We'll take a look at its features in just a moment, but here's why I found this interesting.
I have always liked the idea of these little low-powered devices for DIY projects; but
they don't seem to like me.
The Raspberry Pi is the one everyone knows about; but I already have a HomeLab, so deploying
little bits of additional hardware all over the place instead of just virtualising
or containerising it doesn’t make a lot of financial or practical sense to me.
There are situations where it would be really useful to use dedicated hardware for an application;
but if you draw a Venn diagram of those applications, and applications that can run on a Raspberry
Pi, it's just two circles for me.
Because this is an x86 platform there's a lot more we can do with it.
It could serve as the controller for a storage appliance using TrueNAS.
You could use it as a firewall by installing OpenSense or PFSense, or even something a
bit more commercially-focused like Sophos on it.
It can run Windows.
I could turn this into a Veeam backup server for my HomeLab.
Perhaps more interestingly, Veeam has an option for immutable storage to provide protection
against ransomware.
Veeam itself runs on Windows, but the hardened repository that provides that immutability
requires a physically separate x86 Linux server.
This could be that!
And yes, all of the usual HomeLab things you might do with a Raspberry Pi apply here
as well.
Home automation with OpenHAB or Home Assistant, file sharing with Nextcloud or ownCloud, a
media server with Plex or Jellyfin, and so on.
Let me know in the comments if there's something specific you'd like to see me do with this.
Right now
I'm going to use it to edit 4K video, because that's an obvious thing to do, right?
Out of the box it comes running a version of Linux called CasaOS.
This is IceWhale's own creation, based on a Debian 11 desktop.
Its main party trick is a user-friendly web interface for managing the device.
This lets you deploy common apps like Nextcloud or Jellyfin in containerised form from an
app store of sorts.
Basically, it's a HomeLab in a box; and although it looks pretty, I didn't spend
a lot of time with it because I already have a HomeLab.
I wanted to know how else I can use a ZimaBoard.
Clearly the onboard hardware is going to be limited, so let's have a look at what we
get and how we can extend it.
This particular model comes with a Celeron N3450 and 8GB of RAM.
Obviously when I said "Intel", it's not running an i9 in a passively cooled package like this.
This is the higher-end option of the three models currently offered.
I'll put the specs and prices of all of them up here.
In terms of connectivity: we have two USB 3.0 ports, two gigabit ethernet, one mini DisplayPort
1.2, and a power jack.
Turning it around, we find two SATA III ports and a connector to power your SATA hard drives.
The ZimaBoard comes as standard with a cable to connect and power a single SATA drive.
However, they also sell this optional Y cable that will let you attach two SATA drives and
share the onboard power between them.
This Y cable will only work for 2.5-inch drives though.
If you want to power more than one 3.5-inch drive, you'll need an external power supply.
There is also onboard eMMC storage.
The top two models have 32GB, whereas the low-end model only has 16.
Personally, I would like to have seen 64GB on the high-end model.
One of the advantages of an x86 platform like this is its ability to run Windows, but 32GB
is barely enough to install Windows; and by the time you've installed drivers and updates,
you'll be out of space for any apps.
In fairness, they describe it as a single board server, not a desktop; and 32GB is enough
to run most server operating systems onboard, using external storage for your data.
A quick check of the servers currently running in my HomeLab shows that Windows servers
with a desktop won't fit.
Windows servers without a desktop (previously called Server Core) will fit ok in the 32GB
versions.
None of my Linux servers have a desktop installed, and all of them would fit quite nicely on
the 16GB model. So this is only really an issue for the Windows desktop, but it would
be nice to be able to run that more effectively from the onboard storage.
32GB won't go far once you start adding data, though.
There are two SATA ports to add drives, but what if you need more?
Turning around to the side of the ZimaBoard, we see its most interesting feature: a PCI
Express Gen 2 x4 slot.
Need more storage?
Now it has two NVMe slots and an extra SATA port.
Still not enough? The ZimaBoard shop has a 5-port SATA card which takes your total
up to 7 additional hard drives.
That's a lot of storage!
Of course at this point you'll definitely need an external power supply, and your neat
little single board server will have turned into a spaghetti mess of cables.
This slot provides a lot of potential for expandability.
Want to use this as a firewall?
Well it has 2 gigabit ethernet ports.
There's your WAN, there's your LAN.
Need a DMZ?
You could use VLANs.
But what if you need more physical ports?
What if you need more than a gigabit per second?
Slap in 4 more 2.5 gigabit ports via PCI Express and there you go!
There is one small detail I really appreciate about this and it may not be immediately obvious.
Take a closer look at the PCI Express port and you'll see that there's a bit missing.
This isn't a manufacturing defect, they've deliberately left this end open so you can
do stuff like this.
PCI Express Gen 3 x16 card. PCI Express Gen 2x4 slot.
Thanks to that little cutout, this actually fits,
and it actually works!
Let me get this powered up here.
This is a 10 year old card because, well, it's all I have spare.
Part of me really wants to see how ridiculous this would look perched on top of a current-gen
high end GPU though.
Obviously the PCI Express slot would be a bottleneck for bandwidth intensive operations,
but I like that the designers gave us the option to do this.
A quick note about Windows 11 while it's booting up here.
Windows 10 is fully supported, but Windows 11 falls into that weird middle ground where
it will install just fine without complaining to you about unsupported hardware, but it
then won't install future feature packs unless you mess about with the registry.
The reason for this is although the ZimaBoard comes with Secure Boot and a TPM (although
they're disabled in the BIOS by default) its processor is quite dated and it isn't
officially supported by Windows 11.
I'll link of video in the description that details those registry changes that you need to make
for unsupported hardware, but there's no two ways about this:
the Celeron N3450 is an old processor that debuted towards the back end of 2016.
I mean, it does the job and it supports virtualisation, but it is a little disappointing that you
can't buy a model that is actually supported by Windows 11;
and I wonder if a processor fabricated using a newer process node might have been more power efficient,
which is clearly one of the ZimaBoard's design goals.
I assume it would have pushed the price up a bit so it seems like the obvious thing
to do is test the performance of this unit and see how that compares to the amount of
power it's consuming.
I've mentioned the Raspberry Pi in this video because of the form factor, but in reality
that's not the competition here.
Think of the potential use cases I've been listing off:
PFSense, TrueNAS, Veeam, Windows, Sophos XG... none of these will run on a Raspberry
Pi.
The real competition for this, I think, is an old computer.
A lot of us techies will have old computers that could be redeployed in a home lab, so
with that in mind, does the Zemo board still make sense?
To try and answer that, I'm going to benchmark it against my desktop and my laptop.
The laptop's fairly old and its Intel i5-7200U was released about the same time as the ZimaBoard.
They are both mobile processors designed for power efficiency, so that should be an interesting
comparison.
I'm going to run Cinebench R23 to put it under load.
To be clear, I'm expecting the score to be terrible.
It's a passively cooled Celeron, this is not a realistic use case for it; but what
I'm really interested in is how much power it consumes when it's under load because
that tells me how much it'll cost to run.
To no one's surprise, the ZimaBoard scored terribly in Cinebench and the desktop wiped
the floor with both it and my aging laptop in terms of raw performance.
When we look at idle power consumption, the ZimaBoard and laptop both used a fraction
of the desktop's.
This makes sense, seeing as the ZimaBoard needs to run without active cooling, and the
laptop is intended to run from a battery.
Power consumption under load shows a similar pattern to the Cinebench score, although in
this case lower is better.
The desktop ran away from the others, exceeding 200 watts.
The laptop hovered around 25 watts, and the ZimaBoard never reached double figures.
To create a crude sort of efficiency score I've divided the Cinebench score by the
watts consumed, and we end up with this.
As expected, the desktop was the least energy efficient; but the real competition is between
the ZimaBoard and the laptop, and the ZimaBoard came out on top.
I still can't help but wonder how a more modern architecture would have performed,
but this is a good result.
It's not enough of an efficiency win over the laptop that I could say the difference
in electricity would pay for the ZimaBoard, even if taken over a five year lifespan.
On the other hand though: my laptop is not going to last another five years.
It's starting to fall apart as it is, the ZimaBoard is brand new by comparison, and
I couldn't buy a laptop for the same price as the ZimaBoard.
The ZimaBoard is also much smaller and completely silent.
So if you have an application that doesn't need a lot of processing power, I think this
is a nice option.
But how does it handle video editing?
Obviously it won't.
Not natively.
I do have an idea that I've been wanting to try out though; and this seems like just
the right device for it.
I have a desktop upstairs that I do my editing on.
It has a Ryzen 3700X and a Radeon 5700 XT.
It's enough to edit 4K video and play games respectively at 1440p; but it's upstairs,
and I would quite like to harness its gaming ability on my sofa and its workstation capabilities
downstairs, and perhaps when I'm away from home.
Editing or gaming with a laptop keyboard and trackpad sucks.
What I need is a cheap and portable device to use as a thin client.
The device is only part of the equation though. I also need some remote access software that
can handle a decent frame rate with low latency.
Video editing is different from general office work.
If I'm trying to line up audio with video frames, I can't be having lag.
The software I'm going to pair with this is Parsec.
It's remote access software that was designed with low latency in mind for game streaming,
and allegedly this makes it good for video post-production as well.
Once upon a time you could run it in a Raspberry Pi, but no longer, so my sensible reason for
putting it on a ZimaBoard is remote video editing and my less sensible option is to
plug it into my TV and play games.
Before we can do that, we need to upgrade the ZimaBoard with WiFi.
Happily, I have a little WiFi 6 PCI Express card that IceWhale sent along with it.
This does highlight a slight issue with the ZimaBoard's design, though.
With the standard PCI bracket attached, the display port is blocked off.
Fin if you're running this as a headless server, I guess, but if you want to plug it
into a monitor or a TV, you'll need to remove the bracket.
For the other cards this wasn't an issue, but for the WiFi card I have nowhere to attach
the antenna and I'm a bit worried about these wires.
I also found that with the PCI Express card hanging off the side, a bit of extra support
was necessary to prevent disconnections.
This product is going to appeal to tinkerers, so I'm sure some of you could 3D print a
mount or something; but I'm just going to have to balance this next to it for the time
being.
I've got myself set up here.
The desktop's connected by Gigabit Ethernet and the ZimaBoard is connected to the same
LAN using WiFi 6 at about a gigabit.
This should be a pretty ideal scenario for me to work downstairs.
Now let me show you why I chose Parsec.
I'll start by comparing it to the venerable VNC.
Honestly, I don't know why people keep recommending it as there are much better performing options
these days.
I have memories of doing remote support back in the day for customers with bad internet
connections using VNC.
It was rough.
Even over a gigabit LAN, it's not cut out for this use case.
I'm playing back a video at 1080p and it's very choppy.
It also doesn't support audio.
Frankly, it's not built for this; but I wanted to start here before it got spammed
in the comments.
The more obvious thing to use in Windows is the Remote Desktop that's built in with
the Pro Edition and up.
This is a lot better.
RDP is pretty damn good, and for general office work it's absolutely good enough.
The video isn't quite as smooth as I'd like it to be for this though, so let's
try Parsec.
I'm not sure how well this will be picked up by the time it's gone through my capture
card and YouTube, but there is a tangible improvement here.
Remote Desktop had tiny but frequent little stutters.
Not massive.
Like I say, you wouldn't notice this using Microsoft Office.
But working with video, it's enough to be annoying and I'm sure it would be for gaming
as well.
I wouldn't say Parsec is indistinguishable from the local experience if you look at
it very closely, but it is close enough that using it for a while I genuinely forgot I
was on a remote computer.
It streams either H.264 or H.265, depending on the capabilities of the devices on each
end.
I'm happy to report that H.265 is working fine in the ZimaBoard, and this is small
enough to chuck in my bag and go...
as long as I don't need a wireless that is. If I chuck it in with a PCI card sticking
out, it'll probably snap.
Which brings me to a few downsides.
I've mentioned the onboard storage being a bit limited and the CPU being quite old.
Something else I'd like to see in a future revision is a couple more USB ports.
Two is enough to use this as a headless server, but I've installed a few different operating
systems while I was playing with this, and here's the problem with two USB ports:
one for the keyboard, one for the mouse, where do I plug in the install drive?
I mean, OK, USB hubs are cheap; but it'd be nice if I hadn't had to dig one out,
and I've been using this a lot.
If I'm being picky, I would have preferred Intel networking over Realtek.
Intel has a better reputation for reliability and performance, although personally I haven't
really had problems with either.
I have had the odd occasion in the past where a Realtek NIC wasn't supported, though.
That'll have been something obscure like a HomeLab VMware build and won't apply to
ninety-nine percent of people; but the obscure scenario where it does
is also probably the sort of obscure kind of scenario where someone might try to use
a hackable single board server, which is why I mention it as a consideration.
In terms of repairability, the only part that's user serviceable is the BIOS battery.
You can get at that by removing the screws from the protective acrylic layers at the
back in case you mess up and need to reset your BIOS.
Everything else is soldered in place, but it's a single board server.
It's kind of in the name there.
Is it worth buying?
For the right person, yes.
The right person, I think, is a tinkerer.
If you consider any one specific use case, there's probably a better option somewhere
for that specific use.
Plug in a few drives and you have a NAS, but if you're setting out specifically to build
a NAS you'd probably be better served by a chassis with room for hot-pluggable disks.
Add some more network ports and you can build a comprehensive firewall/router combo,
but there are pre-built devices with lots of NICs already included without hanging them
off an external PCI Express card.
Where this shines is in its size, power consumption, and its adaptability.
Today it can be a NAS and tomorrow it can be a firewall.
For example, I'm going to plug it into my TV next, and after that I think I'm going
to build an immutable backup repository with it.
Maybe I'll stick Kali Linux on it and make some security-related videos.
That's all part of the fun with it and that was my overall impression.
If you're into HomeLabbing this is a fun little gizmo with quite a few practical uses.
Let me know what you think in the comments, and let me know what you'd like to see me
do with it.
I'll put a link in the description. I don't get any kickback, but if you're into home-labbing
feel free to check it out.
Check out one of these videos while you're at it as well, and give the like button a bit
of love.
See you next time!