ZimaBoard 2 Buying Guide: Do You Need the 16 GB Version?

The ZimaBoard 2 comes in two variants, and the difference between them is small.

Processor, networking and expansion are the same on both. RAM and eMMC are what differ.

So the 1664 gives you more memory and nothing else. Which means the buying decision comes down to one question: when do 8 GB get tight?

ZimaOS Plus is preinstalled. Proxmox, pfSense, TrueNAS, Unraid, OpenWrt, Home Assistant OS or plain Debian all run on it too. IceWhale gives two years of warranty in the EU, one year elsewhere.

What 8 GB actually carries

My 832 has been running around the clock for months. On it:

• Vaultwarden behind a Cloudflare Tunnel
• AdGuard Home
• Tailscale
• Gitea
• Homarr as a dashboard
• Jellyfin
• PeerDrop and a few smaller services
• a 1.52 TB SATA drive in the HDD rack

Measured once at idle, once during Jellyfin playback:

Nearly two thirds of the memory stays free while a complete homelab stack runs. For container self-hosting, 8 GB is comfortably enough.

The second column is the more interesting one. Playback moves memory by two or three percentage points, which is to say barely at all. What it costs is CPU time and watts: load goes from 9 to 24 percent, power draw roughly two and a half times up, and the temperature climbed from idle to 58 °C within a minute.

One caveat belongs with that: my Jellyfin runs in Direct Streaming. The video passes through untouched and only the audio track is re-encoded, because the browser can’t handle the format directly. There’s no full video transcode happening, and that’s the genuinely expensive case. If you regularly play formats your devices can’t handle, you’ll land well above my 24 percent.

So a media server mostly costs CPU time, not memory. More RAM doesn’t help here.

If you want to run a password manager, DNS filtering, a VPN, Git, a dashboard and some storage, you don’t need the 1664.

One quirk if you go measuring yourself: the RAM breakdown in the ZimaOS dashboard only lists apps installed through its own app manager. Containers you start from the terminal — Jellyfin, in my case — don’t show up individually. They’re still in the total.

When 16 GB starts to make sense

Three cases where 8 GB gets tight:

Virtualisation. Every VM gets its memory assigned statically, not dynamically like a container. Two or three VMs at 2–4 GB each plus the host, and 8 GB is spoken for. A single VM doesn’t justify the surcharge, though: a firewall like OPNsense gets by on 2 to 4 GB for home use and runs fine on the 832.

Many or large containers. My stack is moderate. Databases, media servers with transcoding buffers, or a dozen additional services are a different order of magnitude.

Soldered RAM. The memory can’t be upgraded later. You can swap a drive whenever you like; with RAM the decision is final at purchase.

That’s what I have the 1664 for. It’s still sitting empty, to be honest — the plan is either a small Proxmox setup or an OPNsense firewall, plus the NVMe adapter. The firewall on its own wouldn’t be an argument for 16 GB; the board just happens to be free. Proxmox is a different matter, that’s the virtualisation case from above. Whether the extra memory makes a noticeable difference in practice is something I can only say afterwards, and that’ll go in its own post.

The bundles

Both variants come in four packages:

Board Only already includes the power supply (12 V / 5 A), the SATA Y-cable and the active fan. You don’t have to buy cooling separately.

Starter Bundle adds a PCIe-to-NVMe/NGFF adapter, a miniDP-to-HDMI cable (4K60) and a 2-bay HDD rack for $40 more. The rack and cable on their own cost $42.80 in the shop, so the bundle pays for itself the moment you were going to add storage anyway.

Mini NAS Kit swaps the simple adapter for the PCIe 3.0 ×4 to dual NVMe M.2, and adds a second network cable.

Firewall Kit is the one to look at if you’re thinking router or firewall: instead of a storage adapter it comes with a PCIe ×4 card carrying four 2.5GbE ports (Intel I226), plus power supply, SATA Y-cable and fan. That puts you at six 2.5GbE ports in total. The surcharge over Board Only is $60 on the 832 and $80 on the 1664. If OPNsense, pfSense or OpenWrt is the plan, it’s worth checking what that card costs on its own before reaching for the bare board. I haven’t tested the kit — I’m going by the shop listing.

The RAM upgrade isn’t priced the same everywhere: $60 on Board Only, $70 on the Starter Bundle and Mini NAS Kit, $80 on the Firewall Kit.

All prices here are the shop’s dollar prices. The shop can be switched to euros, but billing happens in USD — the euro figure is a conversion, not a fixed price. If you’re ordering from the EU, budget for import VAT and, depending on how it ships, customs.

Storage

IceWhale also sent me a PCIe 3.0 ×4 to dual NVMe adapter, which lets you add NVMe storage on the PCIe slot instead of being limited to SATA.

I haven’t tested it yet, so I can’t tell you anything about NVMe throughput on the ZimaBoard 2. Once I’ve measured it, that’ll be its own post.

Either way: the larger eMMC on the 1664 (64 instead of 32 GB) is meant for the operating system, not for data. Picking a variant doesn’t change much about the storage question — you solve that over SATA or PCIe.

What I’d buy

Take the 832 if you’re doing container self-hosting: password manager, DNS filtering, VPN, Git, dashboards, small web services, storage over SATA. My measurements show there’s plenty of headroom left.

Take the 1664 if virtualisation is involved — Proxmox, VMs, a virtualised firewall — or if your stack is clearly going to be bigger than mine. Since the RAM is soldered, the larger variant wins ties.

Neither if you’re running sustained high CPU load. The N150 is the same 10-watt processor in both; more memory doesn’t change that. For a 24/7 transcoder or a build server, this is the wrong board.

If both are too small

If reading this made you realise that 16 GB and an N150 won’t cut it either: IceWhale also sells the ZimaCube 2, which is a considerably larger machine. It isn’t a ZimaBoard variant any more but a different class — a 6-bay NAS with a seventh SSD slot, Thunderbolt 4, DDR5 and desktop mobile processors instead of the N150.

Standard comes with two 2.5GbE ports, Pro and Creator Pack with 10GbE. The seventh slot does around 800 MB/s on the Standard and about 3200 MB/s on the larger variants, according to the manufacturer.

I haven’t tested any of them. So I can’t tell you how the ZimaCube 2 behaves in practice, how loud it gets or what it draws. What the spec sheet does say: going from an N150 to an i3-1215U is real additional performance, and the price starts at more than double a ZimaBoard 2 832. If you want a NAS with a lot of drives and serious CPU load, that’s the right place to look — if you want a quiet box to run services on, stay with the ZimaBoard.