For those looking for a low-power, well-built small office / home office Linux server with interesting connectivity options, the ZimaBoard 2 is an interesting option that has been available for some months now and powered by the Intel N150 processor. Besides the interesting single board hardware and well built aluminum chassis, the offering is rounded out by being preloaded with ZimaOS as a Linux-based “personal cloud OS” to easily get hosting for your own SOHO server needs.
Zima recently sent over a review sample of the ZimaBoard 2 that has been working out well and enduring a variety of benchmarks and testing over the past few weeks. The ZimaBoard 2 comes down to being a SOHO-focused mini server with the heart of it being an Intel N150 powered single board computer within a passively-cooled aluminum chassis.
The ZimaBoard 2 features dual 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, USB 3.1 Type-A ports, and a mini DisplayPort output if wanting this to be a headed server or otherwise adapting the ZimaBoard 2 for other non-server uses.
The ZimaBoard 2 features either 32GB of 64GB of eMMC memory for its main storage of the operating system and related assets.
The intended storage connectivity for those wanting it to be a network attached storage (NAS) device or other storage purposes there are two SATA 3.0 ports with power for externally managing those HDDs or SSDs. There is also one PCIe 3.0 x4 connector on the side of this server. From this PCIe 3.0 interface you can attach an adapter or with a PCIe extension cable attach to an external enclosure for connecting to a PCIe adapter for PCIe M.2 NVMe SSDs or similar. Or from the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface you could also attach a higher-end network adapter, graphics card / accelerator, or other hardware.
It’s decent connectivity options with this for those wanting to connect up to a few drives to the system. Though with being limited to PCI Express 3.0 connectivity will not be as fast as other PCIe 4.0/5.0 options available. It would have been nice if they were able to accommodate one or two M.2 NVMe slots onto the ZimaBoard itself for greater convenience.
The Intel N150 Twin Lake processor is a quad-core part (no SMT/HT) that clocks up to 3.6GHz and has a 6 Watt base power rating and 10 Watt limit while having single channel DDR4/DDR5/LPDDR5 memory support. With the low TDP of the Intel N150, the ZimaBoard 2 is passively cooled but there is also a 4-pin fan connector on the SBC for those wanting to enhance the cooling.
The ZimaBoard 2 comes in two models with the ZimaBoard 2 832 having 8GB of LPDDR5-4800 memory and 32GB eMMC storage while the ZimaBoard 2 1664 (the model being reviewed today) has 16GB of LPDDR5-4800 memory and 64GB eMMC storage.
