The ZimaBoard is a x86 PC in a very small form factor. It comes with "CasaOS" installed but you can just as easily attach a external SSD and install Windows 10 or Ubuntu (Linux) with no problems. For those OSes I would strongly recommend getting the 8GB RAM model, they both work with 4GB but there isn't much free RAM left. Ubuntu is noticeably snappier than Windows 10 with 4GB. There's a couple of important issues to know about using the ZimaBoard in a Windows 10 Pro (64-bit) environment, though some of these points are common to any OS: 1. Wake on LAN is not supported. This is because the ZimaBoard uses the aging and buggy Realtek RTL8168 chip. Windows 10 will only let you install the Realtek "rt640x64.sys" driver from 2015 that does not support Wake on LAN and no combination of any system setting or registry hacking will disable the automatic driver installation. This behavior overrides Realtek's driver installer too, so that won't work. There's no way to use modern Realtek NIC drivers, period. Maybe on Ubuntu it's better but I didn't try further. 2. Sometimes Zima gets into a weird state and will not power on. Plugging in the power cable makes the power light flash once and turn off. To fix this you have to disassemble the case and unplug the CMOS battery which is thankfully socketed, then power it up. I've observed this happens the most when any kind of sleep or hibernation feature turns on. If you didn't know this, you'd just think it was dead and return it as junk. Be sure to disable all sleep, hibernation, and power saving OS options to avoid this. 3. Because both wake on LAN and sleep/hibernation are broken the ZimaBoard can never operate in a low power mode. You can experiment with throttling controls (easier to do in Ubuntu) to try to make it as slow as possible but the power savings don't come close to supporting real sleep/hibernation. Consider the ZimaBoard to be an always-on PC and budget electricity and heat for it accordingly (the heatsink does get quite warm when active, when idle it's warm to the touch but not overly so). 4. Out of the box both CasaOS and Windows 10 assume hibernation works which means your device will turn off after 30 minutes and never turn on again until you cycle the power and/or the CMOS battery connection. It's a big "gotcha" for new users that is very poorly documented by the ZimaBoard makers. 5. ZimaBoard is billed as "hackable" but is NOT open source. There are no schematics available, no documentation that I could find for any of the connectors, no listing of the components used unless you want to physically take it apart and look at all the chips. The documentation that is available is very poor, sparse, and only focuses on the most superficial applications like media streaming. 6. There is no internal sound device and no audio output over the mini Display Port connector. It has a "Intel Apollo Lake SoC - High Definition Audio Controller" peripheral but doesn't expose any output device for applications to use. You'll have to add a USB or PCIe sound device and connect it externally through an analog output. There's also no built-in Wi-Fi or bluetooth. So budget the two USB ports carefully. Now despite all that it worked for my application; I connected the two Ethernet ports directly to two different Windows 10 computers and use the ZimaBoard to share a 500GB SSD to both devices, mapped as a network drive. This allows for fast and easy file sharing across both machines on a private network that isn't online. In addition Remote Desktop works extremely well so you can administer the system with no monitor, keyboard, or mouse attached. I'm really pleased that it met this specific need so perfectly. Not happy about the lack of sleep/hibernation though. The ZimaBoard concept is cool, and they have an almost-good idea. It needs a substantially better NIC chipset, more documentation, and needs to feel less like a Kickstarter project that died after they shipped the product. The bulk of tech support is through Discord only and it's very poor, plus no solutions are saved or browsable for future use given the fleeing nature of Discord. It took a lot of searching to find information that they should just be throwing on to a wiki somewhere. The NIC is fast enough to stream 1080p media to another device for decoding, but it can't keep up the video decoding itself (missing audio aside). Likewise it performs well when the desktop is in 1080p but lags considerably when in 4K. I can't really recommend the ZimaBoard unless your use case is very similar to mine and you don't mind the caveats I described. I do really like it for my application and it's much nicer construction quality than other cheap Mini PCs. It has a lot of potential as a NAS or other network device. Included are screenshots of system info from CPU-Z and HWINFO so you can see the system specs.
