IceWhale Technology Launches the Upgraded ZimaBoard 2, Promises a Compact Fanless Powerhouse
Passively-cooled single-board server can do it all, the company claims, including local LLM inference — with a suitable graphics card.
Single-board computing specialist IceWhale Technology has opened crowdfunding for the ZimaBoard 2, its second-generation passively-cooled single-board server — now moving to the Intel Processor N150 for a claimed tripling of performance over the first-generation design.
"Four years ago, we launched ZimaBoard 1 on Kickstarter with the support of 1,880 backers, kicking off our journey into home servers," IceWhale Xinlei Pan writes of the company's history. "Four years ago, our team was just a group of geeks and developers (honestly, just four guys), itching to make tech fun. Now, we're a 30-strong squad, diving into new tech with users late into the night, learning like there's no tomorrow. Even when bugs strike, we laugh and keep tinkering, fueled by an optimistic vibe that tomorrow's tech will be cooler."
The ZimaBoard 2 is IceWhale's fourth design, after the original ZimaBoard four years ago and 2023's ZimaBlade and ZimaCube "personal cloud" system — the latter of which was the subject of complaints as the top-end ZimaCube Pro model tended to overheat under heavy use, which the company addressed with an optional cooling system upgrade, meaning that IceWhale will truly be hoping, as Pan says, that tomorrow's tech will indeed be cooler.
Like the original ZimaBoard, the ZimaBoard 2 is passively cooled by a case that doubles as a heatsink. Inside is an Intel Processor N150 with four cores running at a single-core boost of up to 3.6GHz, a choice of 8GB or 16GB of LPDDR5x memory, and 32GB or 64GB of eMMC storage preloaded with the company's Linux-based Casa OS software. There are two 2.5-gigabit-Ethernet ports, two SATA 3.0 ports with power, a mini-DisplayPort 1.4 output capable of 4k60 resolution, and a PCI Express Gen. 3 slot on the side with four lanes.
The company is positioning the board as suitable for a range of use-cases: a personal cloud server supporting up to 36TB of SATA storage; a 4k-capable home theater system; a smart home server running Home Assistant; a router or gateway; a firewall; or even a local server for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads, including generative AI (gen-AI) like large language models (LLMs) — though it advises that the system should be paired with a suitable PCIe graphics card or accelerator for these particular jobs.
The ZimaBoard 2 is now funding on Kickstarter, starting at $169 for "Early Bird" backers of the ZimaBoard 2 832 with 8GB of memory and 32GB eMMC storage plus a 60W power adapter and cable for the SATA ports. All hardware is expected to ship in August, IceWhale promises — though it must be noted that, at the time of writing, a small number of ZimaCube backers were still awaiting their rewards.
