IceWhale ZimaCube 2 Personal Cloud NAS review

IceWhale built its reputation on a simple idea: affordable, hackable, x86 single-board servers for people who want control over their own data. The original ZimaBoard launched in 2021 on Kickstarter. Using an Intel Apollo Lake processor, it offered a level of expandability that ARM-based boards crowding the market at the time couldn’t match. Four years later, the company is back with the ZimaBoard 2, and the update is substantial in all the ways that matter most.

The new board harnesses the power of the Intel N150 processor from the Twin Lake family, silicon that IceWhale claims delivers roughly three times the CPU performance over the Apollo.

Alongside that comes faster LPDDR5x memory, an upgraded PCIe Gen 3 x4 slot, dual 2.5GbE networking, and the same passively cooled all-aluminium chassis concept that made the first board so appealing to homelab builders.

Two variants are available at retail: the ZimaBoard ...