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Could you PLEASE change the sound in your intro clip to a CARBONATED BEVERAGE and NOT something FLAT like WATER???? Being that you are a COMPUTER and BEER CHANNEL you should at least make it SOUND LIKE YOUR POUR BEER and not Capri-Sun :)
Technically, pouring a beer should sound like nothing, as out of a tap, bottle or can, you pour down the side and avoid splashing or 'folding' of the liquid. That makes for a pretty terrible sound effect, just like punching someone in a movie would.
The price shocked me, but I also hadn't realised Pis have apparently gotten expensive either... I got one back in 2020, but that was just a 3B+ that cost me £31.
@@mgkleym According to an interview with Eben Upton (of the RPi Foundation) a few months ago, the Pi availability for consumers should begin clearing up this summer, and be fully available by fall. Whether retail prices drop back to pre-shortage times, who can say.
@@dktol56 I doubt that. Now that RPi has signed on with Sony, there won't be any consumer availability. Eben got greedy and started catering to corporations. RPi is dead in my eyes. We're better off moving to this, Orange Pi, or RockPi. All three are more powerful than the RPi with lower costs.
As much as I like things like this. I feel like SBC like a Pi fit what they do because of the price For about this price range, if not cheaper. I can pick up a mini PC from HP, Dell, Lenovo. Using either an i5/i3/celeron/some with an i7 of a somewhat recent generation, or some Ryzen 3, 5's athlons The biggest difference being that it doesn't have the two sata ports, but has one sata on the inside, with some just having two M.2 (which I'm thinking I might pick one of those up and see if I can 3d print an external 3.5 inch mount for it along with using an M.2 to sata adapter) But you end up with something that has more horse power, far more ram, and could even run a few VM's for a very similar price.
I agree. I use a couple HP EliteDesk 800 G3 with i5 6500T and even expanded them with an M.2 2.5GBe NIC in the WiFi M.2 Slot and You still have the advantage to upgrade up to 64GB RAM and even the CPU down the line the G3 35W if I remember correctly would support up to a i7 7700T.
I get your point but there's another difference you're missing: Power Consumption. Any Dell Optiplex Mini with an i3 or i5 would have idle power consumptions way higher than a Pi or the Zima Board. Maybe not a huge deal in US but here in Europe can make a noticiable difference in the bill.
Yeah I would recommend Lenovo and then Dell. I've fixed way too many HP brand computers. They are total junk but I've never actually worked on a small form-factor desktop
Right where you were showing the list of docker mounted volumes was were you can add volumes as well (on the right hand side). Restart the container and the path is now mounted. It has nothing to do with permissions really, its just a misunderstanding of how containers work.
I just recently got one of the 832 models, I believe there is solder points to the right of the PCIE slot for front IO that a power and reset button could be connected to, but I don't know the pinout yet for them, also you can change the directory for any docker container by first going into the files folder to browse the file directory, going to whatever location you want the storage to be for that docker container, creating a folder for what you are wanting, then right clicking the folder and selecting "copy path" then pasting that path into the host path field in the container settings, I tested this with plex and it worked wonderfully, although there is no documentation that I could find for it.
The pinout is on their site, a little hard to find. I put a switch on mine and one of the holes is a real challenge to desolder. A momentary switch will power it off and on.
I think you need to look in to docker a little more, you're talking about updates and data, my docker containers are all running with their data stored outside of the container and fully backed up. I can update the docker container by restarting it, and if I lose the container, all I have to do is download a new one and point it to the data folder.. running VMs is great in certain cases, but I think you're really missing out on what Docker can do
I put promox on my zimaboard, created a bunch of VMs, one of which is a pihole and another one is a docker swarm node. This little guy has been working hard and using up less than 5W. Impressive.
Replaced my 'fat' Proxmox server (home automation and NAS) with two Zimaboard servers running Proxmox. Moving the lxc containers was easy and power consumption is now reduced to half of the server I replaced. The new setup is stable as a rock. A Zimaboard version with 16 GB memory would be on my wishlist to be able to spin up more lxc containers.
One major caveat about using these for pfSense that you didn't mention: the Realtek NICs. I, and numerous others, have had nothing but problems trying to run pfSense with Realtek NICs on a gigabit WAN. The best I could ever manage, even with manually-updated drivers, was ~350 Mbps. Replacing my Realtek NICs with Intel NICs immediately, and effortlessly, increased my peak WAN speeds to >900 Mbps.
@mipmipmipmipmip Depending on how much space you have for the machine, and what all you want it to do, you could go with a used office pc. A dell Optiplex 5050, with an i5 6500, 16GB of ram and an ssd for $140 roughly with 2 pcie slots for extra networking. It has an integrated intel nic and you could add up to 4 more nics per pcie slot as well.
I've been experimenting with laptop motherboards, to make them work as SBCs, and I've had many interesting results. I think that in order to promote home-lab/home-servers, that are really cheap and available, and better than things like the PI, AND also reduce ewaste greatly, there should be a movement of enthusiasts transforming those good old laptop mobos into "sbc" or home server setups. There's little content of that on youtube, and it does requiring some figuring out (like powering them, turning them on, and settings so that the thing works more like a server than like a laptop while still sipping power). Maybe you can tap into that space Jeff? just a suggestion :) love your content keep it up!
@@vluri258 how can you say they are not made to be on 24/7? This doesnt even make any sense. I have 2 machines that havfe been runn ing for 4+ years straight and never get above 70C under heavy load and I havent ever changed thermal paste even. Ridiculous statement
One thing nobody doing these Pi alternative videos ever seem to discuss is one of the Pi's biggest features, the GPIO and software support for using those GPIO. I use Pi's in a project I am working on and need to be able to program those pins for running buttons, relays and LED's. We looked at alternative boards when Pi's got impossible to get or were exteremely marked up by scalpers. In my research no other boards had any real software support around using the GPIO making them usless for our project needs.
@@edo386as well you can make your own board controlled by uart that can be used directly in code than adding pi pico which is RPi and unnecessary layer of communication
I agree here. It's not a pi replacement without onboard gpio output equivalent to a pi. A lot of people may use a pi in use cases that doesnt need gpio and there are better systems to use than a pi in that case but gpio enabled single boards was the use case pi was originally created for. Now you can build your own gpio controller or whatever but for most projects that's a huge amount of overhead and introduces another layer of communication abstraction which means you can't use software that was written for a pi.
Yes, I agree gpio is a killer feature of rpi, but I didn't use it. Another goodies are large community and documentation. Most of people are too lazy and too busy to play with something poorly documented. Unfortunately, rpi doesn't have pcie and sata. That's a pity. If the prices will be high, then the closest competitors will be old PCs or laptops. And nothing could beat em in price/performance + x86 compatibility category.
May I suggest mini PCs such as prodesk mini? Slightly bigger profile, but also much more powerful. They often come with Intel AMT, which provides out of band management and remote kvm.
I do like the Zima board. I just immediately installed Ubuntu server minimal, installed docker with the docker folder on a mounted 1tb sata drive. I just plugged in 2 8tb usb hard drives for media storage and use portainer to manage a jellyfin and a bind9 DNS server with a samba server and cron jobs using rsync to do light data backups. Worked well and just took a day to replace my old pi solutions with.
This was more a review of the operating system than the board itself. To make it feel like less of an advertorial it would have been nice to test a few PCIE addons, give an idea of performance of the online NICs and SATA ports etc. Hopefully a follow up will come! Love your content.
If it's designed to run that OS surely that makes it necessary to review as part of the process. If you have problems getting it to do what you want because of terrible / non-existent documentation that's a major stopping point for someone like me who has only a basic knowledge of Linux and relies on guides a lot.
The OS is a MAJOR consideration when choosing ANY computer to use for any project! Countless uninformed people have bought what they thought was the "latest Pi replacement" only to discover they couldn't get it to boot, or not much beyond that. Then, when they looked online to get help, there was little to no documentation, and the company that made it / sold it was not helpful or unresponsive because all their time was going toward trying to patch their firmware. A solid user base is also important. How are you going to get the libraries to flash all your LEDs the way you want, huh? Or, say you want to do something complicated like turn on a light or a fan when you press a button... Are you going to write that software? I didn't think so ... All those factors are important.
Yes it was, but PCIe devices will have the same performance as any other system with an N3450 and Debian. OS is important. If Raspbian was useless I think the RPi wouldn't be so popular either.
People buying up Raspberry Pi not just because of it's ability as a server, it runs on ARM and low power needed, it has GPIO ports, it is cheaper than any x86 boards
I love the ZimaBoard 832 - I have recently installed 2 of them in my home lab with a third on the way. I agree that the biggest issue is the installed OS. However once I figured this out I have started fresh and thrown that away immediately. I have tried TrueNas Core, Open Media Vault, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Windows 10. Of all the I don’t recommend Windows (but it does run but slow) and CasaOS (too restricted). These are great, low power, silent, and relatively inexpensive devices. I also wish they had a power button and POE, hey maybe even a 2.5GB NIC or and SFP+ port instead of the 2 1GB NICs. Thanks for the review.
A used i5 business mini pc from EBay is usually cheaper and far more powerful than any Celeron-based computer. If you do not need the specialized features of this product then there are definitely better/more affordable options on the used market.
Love this thing I use it as a general lab computer, its first use was a mini proxmox server. For some one who wants to tinker this thing is amazing for what it is
I like these little machines but I feel like once you start to hit this price point, a comparably equipped 1L micro PC is a better value especially since neither a 1L or this SBC supports PoE. Excellent video and honest review!
I know RaspBerry Pi 3b+ is right not expensive, we have to pay 140€ and the ZimaBoard 832 cost around 230€. But what the most people want is a little tiny server with a tiny website were they can store some log-data, may be temperature or the statistics of the cat-door or the data from the beehive (weight, temperature, humidity). I do this with a RaspBerry Pi Zero W and he is consuming 0.25 Watt in idle mode and if I activate the camera to get a picture / video this are around 1.2Watt ! I use ARMbian at my Pi4 and "Raspberry Pi OS" on the Zero, can configure everything how I want. The community is big and I get a lot of help if I need it.
Decided I wanted a small server to take a few services off my unraid box. Looked around at Pi and the alternatives. Then said F it and bought an HP t630 thin client off eBay for $50. Mine came with 8gb ram and 32gb m.2. Dropped ubuntu on it and the network servers and utilities I needed and it's doing just fine.
Obligatory shoutout to the old-ish sff office mini PCs you can get for similar price and have more power and IO. ServeTheHome channel has a long series about them and what you can expect from those. They have reached a point where you can get a lot of bang for your buck
8:26 You might be able to mount --bind your remote location into the folder that emby is configured to use. I remember years ago when I used the snap release of Nextcloud server it had the same issue of not having permissions to the external drive I wanted it to use. Obviously snaps can have those permissions modified, but I worked around it at that time by just doing mount --bind remotedir defaultdir and it worked just fine.
re: Docker volumes, at 8:21 replace "/DATA" with "/mnt/your_ssd/Movies/" etc. "DATA" is just a placeholder. I would love to see you embrace docker/podman more, seems like you're missing out on the benefits of super-light, super-portable containers.
Yes, everyone, listen to this man! PLEASE stop buying Raspberry Pi's - then there will be some left in stock at normal retail prices in some places so I can buy some.
i set up casa os with plex yesterday to give access to external drive just click add on the right where text is you can copy path from file manager and copy it there
I've upgraded my Zima Board so much that now it's a fully autonomous Robot and it's painting pictures.... It started painting portraits but now it's painting the cosmos with a small blue square in the middle of the picture... Every canvas is slightly bigger than the last. Can someone give me some advice? I don't want to downgrade it though, I want to see where it's going... I don't want to switch it off either.
For $199 you may as well buy a NUC, there are all kinds of processors and memory configs available...and they have GPUs as well, so they're much more suitable for the kinda is things most people use them for!
You can mount your external storage over the top of the directories on your internal storage where your uncooperative application expects to be able to save data.
I liked getting Pi Zeros at MicroCenter on Pi day (March 14th) for $3.14. I ended buying a Zero 2 at the local MicroCenter on launch day for $15 and was dismayed by the fact they were charging more for each one you bought to discourage scalpers. Little did I know that over a year later it would be impossible to buy another one for less than $50
You are lucky, here in Germany they are all sold out since a long time. If s shop get hands on some, then they are expensive and sold out immediately. I hate this crisis, because I think this is all artificial.
Got a gamepi43 4.3" gameboy shell bundeled with pi4b 2gb for 130€/140$. Which is pretty nice. But pi's are now more available like a pi4 with power supply is 89,95€ right now.
I and the teachers I support (k-6, 7-9, 10-12) have all switched over the past 2-3 years to other pi clones and used TFF PCs for students, With the comeback of $100 netbook laptops we support them, too. This board looks interesting for them, although double the price point we want for the kids. Since we are all Debian / Ubuntu based, this thing looks good...
5:52 could someone explain this point to me? Not that I think I know better, I’m just curious what he means by Update Resilience when I assume you could just hold off on docker or orchestrator (like portainer) updates until all of your containers support a new version. And for Data Separation, idk, I thought containers that use an organized file structure both on the host system and within the container itself that reference to locations on the host system, then taking all of that data and doing routine backups would be a good enough “data separation” but maybe I’m just missing something here? To anyone who actually answers, thanks! :)
I've had a ZimaBoard as my home router for quite a while now. I was an original kickstarter backer (or was it indigogo?), and am very happy with that decision. And no, I'm not running CasaOS, even though it seemed fine-ish to me, I have a real server and just needed this thing for the Dual NICs and have a OPNsense running bare metal. It hasn't caused even one problem since I got the thing (a year? maybe 1.5 years?), and it's just running great. This is obviously a rather simple use for it, as the hardware can do much more than just menial routing tasks, but still. I could just plonk in a 4 port NIC, but that will just use more power and honestly 2 NICs with VLANs is so far fine for my use case. Definite recommendation from me.
In lieu of overpriced Raspberry Pi boards and oversized second hand rack servers, I have been running a cluster of low-power mini PCs! Intel 12th gen N series, AMD Zen3 U series.. all good options, and I have RAM maxed out in these. PC market is in a slump, so they've been super cheap on Amazon as of late. Most Intel N series mini PCs have dual Intel NIC at a minimum, which is really nice.
Korean Hardkernel Odroid boards are order of magnitude more thought out than RPis in terms of layout, peripheral connectors, power supply and heat dissipation. Especially concerning their rather modest price. And Petitboot is the best bootloader I've ever seen on ARM SBCs.
I had one literally save my network last night. I'm so glad I had one to tinker with (as well as a bootable USB with pfSense). due to flooding and an oops, my bad, in leaving a power strip on the floor, my old pfsense box shorted out. Enter Zima Board. boot it up, set up my LAN IP block, and I'm reconnected to the internet. now if only I had saved my previous configs so I didn't need to remap static mappings...but live and learn, and have a spare Zima Board!
I personally don't like the soldered mass storage. The whole board gets useless if that MMC storage breaks at some point - it's still flash with limited write-cycles, right? I would always prefer a swapable MicroSD.
Will definitely enter the sbc space in the future when the market readjusts, but as some have pointed out $200 puts devices in competition with a lot more stuff.
What if we abuse the PCIe lanes, In which we create a break out board, several of the small ones Connect PC to a small cluster without using network connections. You could then have the whole thing controlled by a larger CPU like an Intel Core or AMD AM4/5.
Found a number of advantages going x86 over ARM for non-open-source apps as they just don't have ARM support or non-x86 support was patchy. I believe x86 seems to see patches and updates more quickly and OS availability is generally quite a bit wider.
@@cosmefulanito5933 not necessarily. There are apps in this category such as the Skype client for instance where capitulation to Microsoft by using windows can be avoided still.
The issue with PoE is that at 12v you could only have a theoretical 2.5 amps from a PoE+ port (30 watts). In reality that’d be closer to 2.4 assuming some forms of inefficiency in the power conversion
i plan to take a disused dual core smeleron/4gb ddr4/32gb emmc hp chromebook sans carcass and add an ngff to mini pcie adapter and THEN a mini pcie to quad sata adapter to it...i think that along with a cheap usb3 to eth adapter will get me a decent dual core NAS with four ports for around $100 minus case and disk drives...so long as the mpcie to sata adaptor works well (which i believe it will based on what ive read up on the controllers on it) it will be decent....though about going for a ngff to pcie x1 adapter and then a pcie x1 to 16-port sata card (with several switches, yup) and may still do that since i am looking for lots of cheap capacity but not high perf or throughput.........saves some ewaste from the bin too!
I'm definetly looking forward to a similar SBC with m.2 and Pcie (or a 10gig sfp+ port) for small server (web, mail, light game servers ... ), it can really become a worthwhile alternative to old used i7 PCs in the price/performance comparisons (factoring increased efficiency, and long-run costs)
So I took server 2016 off of my laptop and was moving it over to a Lenovo m710 small form-factor desktop and the damn thing would never update ethernet drivers (even manually), so I had to skip that idea. All I need is WDS. I guess I'll have to run it as a virtual machine. After I installed the VMI was getting random errors so that may not work either.
Just get used mini-pc(s) from HP/ Lenovo/ Dell for those price. You'll get much-much better perf. Although, they use active cooling. But you can underclock and undervolt, then limit the PL1/PL2 to just, like, 20w and tune down the fan.
I live near Cambridge in the UK, and can buy Pi4's at retail price pretty easily from the Raspberry Pi shop - in fact they have all models except the Zeroes in stock every day.
LOVE the fact that you pointed out some shortcomings while everyone else seems to be ranting and raving about them. I got an 832 for 160ish on Amz. The advantage to the FF and exposed PCIE slot is you can plop this thing on your desk and swap cards and basically monkey around VERY easily. "Hackable" is def a stretch too. I still plan to grab a couple of HP elitedesk G4's (or equiv Lenovo or Dell..maybe)for lab crap, like proxmox clustering etc, but dont regret buying this AT ALL given the "monkey factor". Plus, its REALLY cool. Doesn't need a case, as the design aesthetic is fantastic. Dollar for dollar, there are more powerdul and flexible options out there, but who doesn't love cool?
Technically it has some kind of power button, but i haven't tried it. There are some pins somewhat exposed and you can short them by screwdriver or something. Less convenient is to autologin as root at tty1 and to connect keyboard and type shutdown when needed. My issue with this is that 216 does not have much memory and power and higher models have alternatives. And lack of enclosure. With SATA SSD attached it's a bit messy (also internal emmc is not needed) I prefer having docker/podman, using VMs is a waste of disk space ... well with 1TB being cheap and one service having 10GB ... it's actually quite ok.
some thin clients use the same chips if i remember corectly. they might also be found cheap sometimes especially used. tough one should doubble check what cpu it comes with if you are buying used
Regarding Power over Ethernet... How much power can you put through standard ethernet cables - can they do 36W (safely)? Or does it exist special PoE cables designed for high wattages, perhaps?
I recently got a lattepanda v1 for 30 euro locally (someone was dumping a large amount of em) and I agree, these low power x86 chips are the way to go. Still thinking how I could use the built-in Arduino of mine for anything lol
Hey, Jeff! If you don't know, you can get poe splitters that give you power out via a dc barrel jack- janky, but for this application you could definitely run this guy off POE usnig one of those
I'd be interested in the power consumption of this little thing. Might be a good choice for a opnsense Box, especially with the 2 NICs. Currently running an old MacBook as my opnsense firewall/router but this was always meant to be temporary. If this thing can deliver on performance with Dual Gbit and doesn't draw more than my MacBook with a cooling plate attached, I'd be down for it.
I bought an epyc 9124 64 gb ddr5 off of eBay, and a 10g supermicro motherboard. I have 112 usable pcie5 channels, and 12 ddr5 memory channels, up to 6TB of ram.
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Could you PLEASE change the sound in your intro clip to a CARBONATED BEVERAGE and NOT something FLAT like WATER???? Being that you are a COMPUTER and BEER CHANNEL you should at least make it SOUND LIKE YOUR POUR BEER and not Capri-Sun :)
Technically, pouring a beer should sound like nothing, as out of a tap, bottle or can, you pour down the side and avoid splashing or 'folding' of the liquid.
That makes for a pretty terrible sound effect, just like punching someone in a movie would.
Have a look at the Odroid H3+ (N6005)
How many streams can it transcode simultaneously at once? Let's say i want to stream a 4k 40mbit stream to 2 devices?
👍
The price shocked me, but I also hadn't realised Pis have apparently gotten expensive either... I got one back in 2020, but that was just a 3B+ that cost me £31.
You also can't buy them. Like even microcenter doesn't have stock most of the time and they don't sell them online.
Intel SBCs never were any cheaper than that.
@@mgkleym I would like to have something like microcenter but the best I get is Curry's.
@@mgkleym According to an interview with Eben Upton (of the RPi Foundation) a few months ago, the Pi availability for consumers should begin clearing up this summer, and be fully available by fall. Whether retail prices drop back to pre-shortage times, who can say.
@@dktol56 I doubt that. Now that RPi has signed on with Sony, there won't be any consumer availability. Eben got greedy and started catering to corporations. RPi is dead in my eyes. We're better off moving to this, Orange Pi, or RockPi. All three are more powerful than the RPi with lower costs.
As much as I like things like this. I feel like SBC like a Pi fit what they do because of the price
For about this price range, if not cheaper. I can pick up a mini PC from HP, Dell, Lenovo. Using either an i5/i3/celeron/some with an i7 of a somewhat recent generation, or some Ryzen 3, 5's athlons
The biggest difference being that it doesn't have the two sata ports, but has one sata on the inside, with some just having two M.2 (which I'm thinking I might pick one of those up and see if I can 3d print an external 3.5 inch mount for it along with using an M.2 to sata adapter)
But you end up with something that has more horse power, far more ram, and could even run a few VM's for a very similar price.
Also if it's your thing they almost all boot licensed windows. I use one for kodi, launchbox, racecontrol.
I agree. I use a couple HP EliteDesk 800 G3 with i5 6500T and even expanded them with an M.2 2.5GBe NIC in the WiFi M.2 Slot and You still have the advantage to upgrade up to 64GB RAM and even the CPU down the line the G3 35W if I remember correctly would support up to a i7 7700T.
I get your point but there's another difference you're missing: Power Consumption. Any Dell Optiplex Mini with an i3 or i5 would have idle power consumptions way higher than a Pi or the Zima Board. Maybe not a huge deal in US but here in Europe can make a noticiable difference in the bill.
Yeah I would recommend Lenovo and then Dell. I've fixed way too many HP brand computers. They are total junk but I've never actually worked on a small form-factor desktop
@@wrathvenge no one buys windows most of the time anyway
not to mention many modern windows 8 or newer era pcs store the key in the UEFI
Right where you were showing the list of docker mounted volumes was were you can add volumes as well (on the right hand side). Restart the container and the path is now mounted. It has nothing to do with permissions really, its just a misunderstanding of how containers work.
I hope he notices your comment
Exactly, Jeff should try replacing "/DATA/Movies" with the path to his Movies dir on the SSD, etc.
Could he not just edit the YML file?
Exactly. This is a user knowledge error, not an OS issue.
Hey now!
YOU HEARD ME!
Fight fight fight!
It is why I've been gravitating towards x86 mini PCs vs the Rpis.
Zima Petabyte time?
The Jeff battle we all want to see.
I just recently got one of the 832 models, I believe there is solder points to the right of the PCIE slot for front IO that a power and reset button could be connected to, but I don't know the pinout yet for them, also you can change the directory for any docker container by first going into the files folder to browse the file directory, going to whatever location you want the storage to be for that docker container, creating a folder for what you are wanting, then right clicking the folder and selecting "copy path" then pasting that path into the host path field in the container settings, I tested this with plex and it worked wonderfully, although there is no documentation that I could find for it.
The pinout is on their site, a little hard to find. I put a switch on mine and one of the holes is a real challenge to desolder. A momentary switch will power it off and on.
I think you need to look in to docker a little more, you're talking about updates and data, my docker containers are all running with their data stored outside of the container and fully backed up. I can update the docker container by restarting it, and if I lose the container, all I have to do is download a new one and point it to the data folder.. running VMs is great in certain cases, but I think you're really missing out on what Docker can do
I put promox on my zimaboard, created a bunch of VMs, one of which is a pihole and another one is a docker swarm node. This little guy has been working hard and using up less than 5W. Impressive.
only 5watts???? really?
Are You doing everything from a single sd card? Even small hard drive consumes more energy.
Replaced my 'fat' Proxmox server (home automation and NAS) with two Zimaboard servers running Proxmox. Moving the lxc containers was easy and power consumption is now reduced to half of the server I replaced. The new setup is stable as a rock. A Zimaboard version with 16 GB memory would be on my wishlist to be able to spin up more lxc containers.
One major caveat about using these for pfSense that you didn't mention: the Realtek NICs. I, and numerous others, have had nothing but problems trying to run pfSense with Realtek NICs on a gigabit WAN. The best I could ever manage, even with manually-updated drivers, was ~350 Mbps.
Replacing my Realtek NICs with Intel NICs immediately, and effortlessly, increased my peak WAN speeds to >900 Mbps.
@mipmipmipmipmip Depending on how much space you have for the machine, and what all you want it to do, you could go with a used office pc. A dell Optiplex 5050, with an i5 6500, 16GB of ram and an ssd for $140 roughly with 2 pcie slots for extra networking. It has an integrated intel nic and you could add up to 4 more nics per pcie slot as well.
I've been experimenting with laptop motherboards, to make them work as SBCs, and I've had many interesting results. I think that in order to promote home-lab/home-servers, that are really cheap and available, and better than things like the PI, AND also reduce ewaste greatly, there should be a movement of enthusiasts transforming those good old laptop mobos into "sbc" or home server setups. There's little content of that on youtube, and it does requiring some figuring out (like powering them, turning them on, and settings so that the thing works more like a server than like a laptop while still sipping power). Maybe you can tap into that space Jeff? just a suggestion :) love your content keep it up!
Damn.... I've got a couple of old notebooks that are begging for this. Great idea.
Upload something, I’ll watch it 😎
It doesn’t have to be super produced, we can watch at 2x speed
The thing with laptops and even desktops is they're not made to be on 24/7. If you can throttle power go for it.
Hey, how would you hook a laptop mobo to multiple HDs? I know there are some mini pci-x adapters to sata
@@vluri258 how can you say they are not made to be on 24/7? This doesnt even make any sense. I have 2 machines that havfe been runn ing for 4+ years straight and never get above 70C under heavy load and I havent ever changed thermal paste even. Ridiculous statement
One thing nobody doing these Pi alternative videos ever seem to discuss is one of the Pi's biggest features, the GPIO and software support for using those GPIO. I use Pi's in a project I am working on and need to be able to program those pins for running buttons, relays and LED's. We looked at alternative boards when Pi's got impossible to get or were exteremely marked up by scalpers. In my research no other boards had any real software support around using the GPIO making them usless for our project needs.
You can add GPIO with a pi pico to anything anyway.
@@edo386as well you can make your own board controlled by uart that can be used directly in code than adding pi pico which is RPi and unnecessary layer of communication
I agree here. It's not a pi replacement without onboard gpio output equivalent to a pi. A lot of people may use a pi in use cases that doesnt need gpio and there are better systems to use than a pi in that case but gpio enabled single boards was the use case pi was originally created for. Now you can build your own gpio controller or whatever but for most projects that's a huge amount of overhead and introduces another layer of communication abstraction which means you can't use software that was written for a pi.
Yes, I agree gpio is a killer feature of rpi, but I didn't use it. Another goodies are large community and documentation. Most of people are too lazy and too busy to play with something poorly documented. Unfortunately, rpi doesn't have pcie and sata. That's a pity. If the prices will be high, then the closest competitors will be old PCs or laptops. And nothing could beat em in price/performance + x86 compatibility category.
Cqn you point me to useful links? I use firmata on my raspi with arduino unos bcause of higher voltages.
May I suggest mini PCs such as prodesk mini? Slightly bigger profile, but also much more powerful. They often come with Intel AMT, which provides out of band management and remote kvm.
I do like the Zima board.
I just immediately installed Ubuntu server minimal, installed docker with the docker folder on a mounted 1tb sata drive. I just plugged in 2 8tb usb hard drives for media storage and use portainer to manage a jellyfin and a bind9 DNS server with a samba server and cron jobs using rsync to do light data backups.
Worked well and just took a day to replace my old pi solutions with.
This was more a review of the operating system than the board itself. To make it feel like less of an advertorial it would have been nice to test a few PCIE addons, give an idea of performance of the online NICs and SATA ports etc. Hopefully a follow up will come! Love your content.
If it's designed to run that OS surely that makes it necessary to review as part of the process. If you have problems getting it to do what you want because of terrible / non-existent documentation that's a major stopping point for someone like me who has only a basic knowledge of Linux and relies on guides a lot.
The OS is a MAJOR consideration when choosing ANY computer to use for any project!
Countless uninformed people have bought what they thought was the "latest Pi replacement" only to discover they couldn't get it to boot, or not much beyond that.
Then, when they looked online to get help, there was little to no documentation, and the company that made it / sold it was not helpful or unresponsive because all their time was going toward trying to patch their firmware.
A solid user base is also important. How are you going to get the libraries to flash all your LEDs the way you want, huh?
Or, say you want to do something complicated like turn on a light or a fan when you press a button... Are you going to write that software? I didn't think so ...
All those factors are important.
Yes it was, but PCIe devices will have the same performance as any other system with an N3450 and Debian. OS is important. If Raspbian was useless I think the RPi wouldn't be so popular either.
I just bought a HP sff pc with a 6th gen I5 for $75 shipped, this seems like a solution without a problem to me.
good choice!
For servers and pc uses yes but it has no gpio so its not a REAL pi replacement
Its ZimaBoard month! Watched that Raid Owl guy...not so sure about him yet though.
You can add a power button on the exposed solder points near the PCI-E slot
People buying up Raspberry Pi not just because of it's ability as a server, it runs on ARM and low power needed, it has GPIO ports, it is cheaper than any x86 boards
loving the lighting in this video, the warm lighting works well with your background wall.
Great review. I overlooked the lack of power over Ethernet in mine. That would have been amazing.
Love the HUGE trackball. Have several of those units corded and wireless spread about the place. Absolutely love them.
I love the ZimaBoard 832 - I have recently installed 2 of them in my home lab with a third on the way. I agree that the biggest issue is the installed OS. However once I figured this out I have started fresh and thrown that away immediately. I have tried TrueNas Core, Open Media Vault, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Windows 10. Of all the I don’t recommend Windows (but it does run but slow) and CasaOS (too restricted). These are great, low power, silent, and relatively inexpensive devices. I also wish they had a power button and POE, hey maybe even a 2.5GB NIC or and SFP+ port instead of the 2 1GB NICs. Thanks for the review.
A used i5 business mini pc from EBay is usually cheaper and far more powerful than any Celeron-based computer. If you do not need the specialized features of this product then there are definitely better/more affordable options on the used market.
I am using OrangePi Zero 2, best price for the performance, also love the GPIO provided.
Love this thing I use it as a general lab computer, its first use was a mini proxmox server. For some one who wants to tinker this thing is amazing for what it is
The Zimaaboard is a cool product, but the most important part is. Is there a rack mount solution? If no, that's a dealbreaker for me.
My first thought too. I want a bracket for these that fits 2-4 in a 1u. Maybe 2u with sata hot swap bays below the boards.
Perhaps if there aren't, the community can design a 3D-printable option?
I mean y'all can just use a shelf right? Gravity mount to the top of that
I like these little machines but I feel like once you start to hit this price point, a comparably equipped 1L micro PC is a better value especially since neither a 1L or this SBC supports PoE.
Excellent video and honest review!
RPI can be powered by USB-C though? There are PoE USB-C dongles.
I know RaspBerry Pi 3b+ is right not expensive, we have to pay 140€ and the ZimaBoard 832 cost around 230€.
But what the most people want is a little tiny server with a tiny website were they can store some log-data, may be temperature or the statistics of the cat-door or the data from the beehive (weight, temperature, humidity).
I do this with a RaspBerry Pi Zero W and he is consuming 0.25 Watt in idle mode and if I activate the camera to get a picture / video this are around 1.2Watt !
I use ARMbian at my Pi4 and "Raspberry Pi OS" on the Zero, can configure everything how I want. The community is big and I get a lot of help if I need it.
Decided I wanted a small server to take a few services off my unraid box. Looked around at Pi and the alternatives. Then said F it and bought an HP t630 thin client off eBay for $50. Mine came with 8gb ram and 32gb m.2. Dropped ubuntu on it and the network servers and utilities I needed and it's doing just fine.
Obligatory shoutout to the old-ish sff office mini PCs you can get for similar price and have more power and IO. ServeTheHome channel has a long series about them and what you can expect from those. They have reached a point where you can get a lot of bang for your buck
Just picked up a base model 2014 Mac Mini with 4GB of ram and an i5 for 70 bucks. Gonna give it a shot as a small file server.
8:26 You might be able to mount --bind your remote location into the folder that emby is configured to use. I remember years ago when I used the snap release of Nextcloud server it had the same issue of not having permissions to the external drive I wanted it to use. Obviously snaps can have those permissions modified, but I worked around it at that time by just doing mount --bind remotedir defaultdir and it worked just fine.
It's good to see you're still making vids after all these years & you're still smashing it!
This box offers a lot of hardware IO, but I wish it had M.2 SATA or PCIe (2230/2242) removable storage instead of soldered eMMC.
re: Docker volumes, at 8:21 replace "/DATA" with "/mnt/your_ssd/Movies/" etc. "DATA" is just a placeholder.
I would love to see you embrace docker/podman more, seems like you're missing out on the benefits of super-light, super-portable containers.
Yes, everyone, listen to this man!
PLEASE stop buying Raspberry Pi's - then there will be some left in stock at normal retail prices in some places so I can buy some.
i set up casa os with plex yesterday
to give access to external drive just click add on the right where text is you can copy path from file manager and copy it there
You could compare it against a box with a n5105 and 4 2.5gbit nics, it costs similar money.
I've upgraded my Zima Board so much that now it's a fully autonomous Robot and it's painting pictures....
It started painting portraits but now it's painting the cosmos with a small blue square in the middle of the picture...
Every canvas is slightly bigger than the last.
Can someone give me some advice?
I don't want to downgrade it though, I want to see where it's going...
I don't want to switch it off either.
I'm a journalist, I'd love to come and talk to your robot about its art
@@dfgdfg_ It wandered off to another planet...
Love to see you do an update on this with the new software.
This thing needs a case where I can make a decent nas, and possibly mount a x1 PCIE card. That is all I am asking for.
For $199 you may as well buy a NUC, there are all kinds of processors and memory configs available...and they have GPUs as well, so they're much more suitable for the kinda is things most people use them for!
couldnt you use setcap on the binary to set the capabilities for giving it access to your storage devices?
You can mount your external storage over the top of the directories on your internal storage where your uncooperative application expects to be able to save data.
I will NOT stop bying Raspberry Pi's! ever.
I will buy each one of them!
I liked getting Pi Zeros at MicroCenter on Pi day (March 14th) for $3.14. I ended buying a Zero 2 at the local MicroCenter on launch day for $15 and was dismayed by the fact they were charging more for each one you bought to discourage scalpers. Little did I know that over a year later it would be impossible to buy another one for less than $50
You are lucky, here in Germany they are all sold out since a long time. If s shop get hands on some, then they are expensive and sold out immediately. I hate this crisis, because I think this is all artificial.
Got a gamepi43 4.3" gameboy shell bundeled with pi4b 2gb for 130€/140$. Which is pretty nice. But pi's are now more available like a pi4 with power supply is 89,95€ right now.
The Zimaboard SBC is so expensive in the UK, you may as well just buy the lowest spec M2 Mac Mini and call it a firm W.
I and the teachers I support (k-6, 7-9, 10-12) have all switched over the past 2-3 years to other pi clones and used TFF PCs for students, With the comeback of $100 netbook laptops we support them, too. This board looks interesting for them, although double the price point we want for the kids. Since we are all Debian / Ubuntu based, this thing looks good...
Buy a used thin client for 50 bucks. It has more than enough power for most tasks that people would do with their home servers.
What kind of QSV is built in? Is the performance usable for transcoding?
5:52 could someone explain this point to me? Not that I think I know better, I’m just curious what he means by Update Resilience when I assume you could just hold off on docker or orchestrator (like portainer) updates until all of your containers support a new version. And for Data Separation, idk, I thought containers that use an organized file structure both on the host system and within the container itself that reference to locations on the host system, then taking all of that data and doing routine backups would be a good enough “data separation” but maybe I’m just missing something here?
To anyone who actually answers, thanks! :)
7:06 , allows you to install but doesn't provide you an option to uninstall or any other advance settings
I've had a ZimaBoard as my home router for quite a while now. I was an original kickstarter backer (or was it indigogo?), and am very happy with that decision. And no, I'm not running CasaOS, even though it seemed fine-ish to me, I have a real server and just needed this thing for the Dual NICs and have a OPNsense running bare metal.
It hasn't caused even one problem since I got the thing (a year? maybe 1.5 years?), and it's just running great. This is obviously a rather simple use for it, as the hardware can do much more than just menial routing tasks, but still. I could just plonk in a 4 port NIC, but that will just use more power and honestly 2 NICs with VLANs is so far fine for my use case. Definite recommendation from me.
In lieu of overpriced Raspberry Pi boards and oversized second hand rack servers, I have been running a cluster of low-power mini PCs! Intel 12th gen N series, AMD Zen3 U series.. all good options, and I have RAM maxed out in these. PC market is in a slump, so they've been super cheap on Amazon as of late. Most Intel N series mini PCs have dual Intel NIC at a minimum, which is really nice.
Korean Hardkernel Odroid boards are order of magnitude more thought out than RPis in terms of layout, peripheral connectors, power supply and heat dissipation. Especially concerning their rather modest price. And Petitboot is the best bootloader I've ever seen on ARM SBCs.
I had one literally save my network last night. I'm so glad I had one to tinker with (as well as a bootable USB with pfSense). due to flooding and an oops, my bad, in leaving a power strip on the floor, my old pfsense box shorted out. Enter Zima Board. boot it up, set up my LAN IP block, and I'm reconnected to the internet. now if only I had saved my previous configs so I didn't need to remap static mappings...but live and learn, and have a spare Zima Board!
Do I see the PCIe slot is cut to allow longer boards to fit?
Love watching to see how low the beer gets as the video goes on
I personally don't like the soldered mass storage. The whole board gets useless if that MMC storage breaks at some point - it's still flash with limited write-cycles, right? I would always prefer a swapable MicroSD.
I think you’re forgetting about the sata ports
Will definitely enter the sbc space in the future when the market readjusts, but as some have pointed out $200 puts devices in competition with a lot more stuff.
What if we abuse the PCIe lanes,
In which we create a break out board, several of the small ones
Connect PC to a small cluster without using network connections.
You could then have the whole thing controlled by a larger CPU like an Intel Core or AMD AM4/5.
I bought 3 x 16GB RAM orange PI 5s which I'm running my home Kubernetes cluster on, so far it's been great been running it for like 2 months now
Found a number of advantages going x86 over ARM for non-open-source apps as they just don't have ARM support or non-x86 support was patchy. I believe x86 seems to see patches and updates more quickly and OS availability is generally quite a bit wider.
non-open source apps = Use an ordinary PC with ordinary Windows.
@@cosmefulanito5933 not necessarily. There are apps in this category such as the Skype client for instance where capitulation to Microsoft by using windows can be avoided still.
I bought a raspberry pi 4b 8gb for £79 a few years ago, and it's still the king the reason being the software fir it is amazing.
And has GPIOS
i think reason for not having poe is the added power reqirement for pcie ?
Get around the power button issue with a LAN/WIFI controlled outlet where the wall wart is plugged in.
Pis are still king for the tremendous software support and versatility.
The issue with PoE is that at 12v you could only have a theoretical 2.5 amps from a PoE+ port (30 watts). In reality that’d be closer to 2.4 assuming some forms of inefficiency in the power conversion
You inspired me to check if HassOS finally has an x86 image, and it does so i know whats happening to my old J1900 box. TY
i plan to take a disused dual core smeleron/4gb ddr4/32gb emmc hp chromebook sans carcass and add an ngff to mini pcie adapter and THEN a mini pcie to quad sata adapter to it...i think that along with a cheap usb3 to eth adapter will get me a decent dual core NAS with four ports for around $100 minus case and disk drives...so long as the mpcie to sata adaptor works well (which i believe it will based on what ive read up on the controllers on it) it will be decent....though about going for a ngff to pcie x1 adapter and then a pcie x1 to 16-port sata card (with several switches, yup) and may still do that since i am looking for lots of cheap capacity but not high perf or throughput.........saves some ewaste from the bin too!
I'm definetly looking forward to a similar SBC with m.2 and Pcie (or a 10gig sfp+ port) for small server (web, mail, light game servers ... ), it can really become a worthwhile alternative to old used i7 PCs in the price/performance comparisons (factoring increased efficiency, and long-run costs)
Could a cell phone be repurposed to manage a simple home network? Like a 3-4 year old, mid-range phone through its type-C port?
I love Docker for update resiliency and data separation... VMs are also nice for this, but in comparison very slow
So I took server 2016 off of my laptop and was moving it over to a Lenovo m710 small form-factor desktop and the damn thing would never update ethernet drivers (even manually), so I had to skip that idea. All I need is WDS. I guess I'll have to run it as a virtual machine. After I installed the VMI was getting random errors so that may not work either.
Talk about the gear, like you talk about the beer. You have great info, but listening to you talk about the hardware is like watching the news.
Just get used mini-pc(s) from HP/ Lenovo/ Dell for those price. You'll get much-much better perf. Although, they use active cooling. But you can underclock and undervolt, then limit the PL1/PL2 to just, like, 20w and tune down the fan.
Will it go with a K80 I bought during the shortages now gathering dust.
I live near Cambridge in the UK, and can buy Pi4's at retail price pretty easily from the Raspberry Pi shop - in fact they have all models except the Zeroes in stock every day.
Just for looks that ZimaBoard is a MUST! I want it Bad!
LOVE the fact that you pointed out some shortcomings while everyone else seems to be ranting and raving about them. I got an 832 for 160ish on Amz. The advantage to the FF and exposed PCIE slot is you can plop this thing on your desk and swap cards and basically monkey around VERY easily. "Hackable" is def a stretch too. I still plan to grab a couple of HP elitedesk G4's (or equiv Lenovo or Dell..maybe)for lab crap, like proxmox clustering etc, but dont regret buying this AT ALL given the "monkey factor". Plus, its REALLY cool. Doesn't need a case, as the design aesthetic is fantastic. Dollar for dollar, there are more powerdul and flexible options out there, but who doesn't love cool?
Technically it has some kind of power button, but i haven't tried it. There are some pins somewhat exposed and you can short them by screwdriver or something. Less convenient is to autologin as root at tty1 and to connect keyboard and type shutdown when needed.
My issue with this is that 216 does not have much memory and power and higher models have alternatives.
And lack of enclosure. With SATA SSD attached it's a bit messy (also internal emmc is not needed)
I prefer having docker/podman, using VMs is a waste of disk space ... well with 1TB being cheap and one service having 10GB ... it's actually quite ok.
Directly host web apps on low power devices to get better performance. Containers are for quick development where performance doesn't matter.
How about a symbolic link to the 1TB drive on the emmc drive. Then browse and create folders from there.
I absolutely love the new outros
some thin clients use the same chips if i remember corectly. they might also be found cheap sometimes especially used. tough one should doubble check what cpu it comes with if you are buying used
Does it support 3.5" drives? I'm thinking of making a 2 drive NAS with 2 big ol spinning drives.
Thank you for this. I've been wanting to make DIY set top box and have been looking for something exactly like this.
Can it actually decode 4k60fps video without dropping frames?
I'm never going to use something like this. But it was neat to learn about it.
Regarding Power over Ethernet...
How much power can you put through standard ethernet cables - can they do 36W (safely)? Or does it exist special PoE cables designed for high wattages, perhaps?
PoE++ can provide 60 watts to a device over standard data cables by running 600mA per pair. 600mA should be fine even with thinner-than-normal cables.
But for that price you can find a thinkpad x260 or a HP ProDesk mini with i5 7500t. Old laptops have the added benefit of built in UPS
I recently got a lattepanda v1 for 30 euro locally (someone was dumping a large amount of em) and I agree, these low power x86 chips are the way to go. Still thinking how I could use the built-in Arduino of mine for anything lol
Hey Jeff,
Could you do a quick Kill-A-Watt value for these small SBCs? (Load/Idle)
Much appreciated.
Hey, Jeff! If you don't know, you can get poe splitters that give you power out via a dc barrel jack- janky, but for this application you could definitely run this guy off POE usnig one of those
I was honestly expecting you to be sipping a nice, vintage Zima--Jolly Rancher optional but encouraged.
We discussed the missed opportunity while shooting this one 😁
@@CraftComputing Missed opportunity? Sure. But at least your dignity and self-respect remain intact! Bwahaha!
I'd be interested in the power consumption of this little thing. Might be a good choice for a opnsense Box, especially with the 2 NICs. Currently running an old MacBook as my opnsense firewall/router but this was always meant to be temporary. If this thing can deliver on performance with Dual Gbit and doesn't draw more than my MacBook with a cooling plate attached, I'd be down for it.
6W TDP
Shoutout to Hardware Haven.
Absolutely! Colten is the man!
How does this fair as a thin client for parsec?
I bought an epyc 9124 64 gb ddr5 off of eBay, and a 10g supermicro motherboard.
I have 112 usable pcie5 channels, and 12 ddr5 memory channels, up to 6TB of ram.