Single Board Computer Review: Does Zima Board Stand Up to the Hype?

foreign [Music] systems and this mess I have in my hands is a 3D printed holder for some hard drives a Zima board with a pcie 5 port adapter on there and it's running true Nas well it's not running right now it's in my hand but when it wasn't in my hand I had it running true Nas actually for about two months because I got curious about these Zima boards I had seen a lot of my friends doing reviews of them and I'm not a big fan of marketing hype not for my friends but from zema themselves or zema board computer themselves saying the world's first hackable because well technically I hack a lot of computers so I don't know that this is the world's first hackable but hey that's good branding and as far as quality of device that's what I wanted to talk about is does it live up to the hype is it worth buying or should you just go with some other system that you can find cheaply on Amazon because it's more powerful or some old computer maybe you have laying around and that's where we're going to break down some of the differences here because this is obviously not going to be more powerful than I5 Dell that you have laying around but what this does have an advantage of is first it's x86 based that's the first thing that really caught my attention of not just trying to be a Raspberry Pi clone because that's really not what it is it is a single board computer but it's also x86 not having to be limited to only things that support arm that means PF sense open sense truenas none of those are Arm based and I'm specifically running sure now scale on this that worked great matter of fact I was shocked at how well it worked and was able to run not just the true Nas as a Nas but applications as well now is it going to run them fast no but let's talk about the specs because that's what's going to lead into why it doesn't run fast but I will already tell you at only 6 Watts it's not going to kill your power bill this is the one big thing that people learn when they start doing home Labs is hey I have these old computers I can find or especially you can get really good deals on Off Lease decommissioned server Hardware but with electricity bills in some areas being much higher with cooling because well the side effect of all the electricity is there's a generally pretty warm amount of air coming out of those servers you now have to pay the power bill and then you also have to pay cooling Bill to dissipate all of that heat hence the reason some of these aren't really popular and really convenient to Tinker with also if you happen to have your arm in a sling and Vlog number 341 is where I talk about my little motorcycle accident it's easier to hold and manipulate and move something around that's a small let's jump to our website and talk about the price and the specs on this device now this is what it looks like when it's not mounted to a little 3D printed case you've got two rj45s a mini display port two USBS a power connector we've got two SATA right here and then you have a little adapter so you can extract power to hook up their drives and of course over here we have the pcie that's the really cool thing because not only is it x86 but has pcie that allows me to do things like plug A5 Port SATA adapter in there to allow me to have more hard drives connected to it now I bought all this myself this is no way sponsored by them and I bought it right from their site and I think that's the first thing I noticed was their site's really convenient we have the models listed and easy to figure out which models which the cores are only four cores in the end 3450 model that I have because I have the Zima board 832 we have a 1.1 gigahertz base frequency 2.2 gigahertz burst and 2 Megs of L2 cache they do have a two core model but I think that one may be sold out now we have four gigs or eight gigs of memory on those models and a 2gig model for that one with the slower processor and then the onboard storage is 16 32 or 32 and of course the important part is this little six Watts right here six Watts isn't bad my only other kind of complaint is the fact that it has real Tech chipset but I didn't find any problems with Realtek my history is generally told me to avoid real Tech but so far this has proved stable not only for running it on pfSense but any of the other applications that me or many of my friends have tried on it this has actually worked really well now over here in the shore this is the exact model that I purchased the jmb 585 chipset it's a PCA 5.2 sata 3 adapter but if you go over to all their products they actually have a lot of accessories and being able to just buy everything kind of a One-Stop shop from their store definitely adds to the hype of the device of hey this is convenient I don't have to wonder which PCA card will work with it I just buy it from the store they have different USB adapters they have well even a pcie 4 channel USB because maybe you want to control a bunch of USB things and this will be a great way to do it just pop this card in there and that 3D print file you'll find that Linked In description below because the 3D print file will hold this as well as the zema board so everything stays nice and together now while the xenover can power a couple drives when you have four more hard drives that you want to attach to it and I put them in like I said this little 3D printed thing the Zima board is not going to power all these drives so I used a external power supply and I had made some comments when I'd done videos or posted pictures on different social media platforms talking about this of calling it a low-powered Nas and people are telling me it's impractical it is probably impractical because of having to use an external power supply and no case so yeah it's not the fun nice clean Nas build that you're looking for but it is a fun tinkering build and I think that's where all the appeal once we separate the marketing calling it the world's first hackable and go hey this is actually a fun thing to Tinker with we got a pcie slot it runs sx86 so we have all these different software options we can test with on it and for learning I think it's a really solid board for that I don't feel bad about paying 179 for something that I can pop a couple different cards in load different operating systems on do my testing and then that's how you level up to something production now the last thing I'll mention is it ships with Casa OS and Caso S I thought was kind of cool I'll leave a link to a video done by my friends over at Hardware Haven diving deeper into it I think it's got a beautiful UI but maybe a little bit lacking in some of the features but it's very cool that they ship it with it it's a good way to get started it on there because you can run more than just like home assistant on this or sync thing or some of those tools by dockerizing everything and loading Linux directly on this you can actually run quite a few applications and it seems to be run them quite well combined with you could even run some of your storage on there and even if you didn't run this in true Nas like I did with those applications it still performs decently with Docker probably better than it would with true nest because there's a little bit less going on because Tunas scale runs it with kubernetes but even so I was able to run applications for several months and even go through updates and share files and things like that in there are you going to be watching 4K movies on it probably not but for tinkering and getting started and learning I think it's an absolutely excellent board nonetheless love hearing from you love hearing what choices you made or what you think of the zema board I definitely give it a thumbs up on reliability build quality is really nice like this is really nice metal I didn't find it to be flimsy at all our 3D printing maybe a little bit flimsy but overall things stay in here pretty well matter of fact we will do the Dingle test where things don't even fall out of it for moving it around with my one hand but nonetheless I love hearing what single board computers you're looking at I know Raspberry Pi's are always a favorite and that favorite kind of created a problem where the demand far exceeded the supply so I do like that alternatives are available in the market I like that this alternative runs x86 and like I said it's a fun Tinker board I definitely recommend it but hey let me know what you think and love hearing from you like And subscribe if you want to see some more content like this from the channel and I'll see you over in the forums [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 44,635

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, zimaboard review, raspberry pi, zimaboard 832, zimaboard, zimaboard pfsense, zimaboard proxmox, zimaboard setup, zimaboard homeassistant, zimaboard home server, casa os, single board server, home server, mini server, zimaboard 2023, zima board, zimaboard mini pc, zimaboard specs, raspberry pi alternative

Id: CO8gagCrAZk

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023