ZimaCube 2 Pro Review An Unexpected 10GbE NAS with Thunderbolt and PCIe Slots

ZimaCube 2 Pro Performance

Under the hood, our ZimaCube 2 Pro review sample is driven by an Intel Core i5-1235U processor, which is part of Intel’s Alder Lake-P mobile family. Intel’s first generation of chips built on their Intel 7 process node, mobile Alder Lake was first introduced in early 2022 and has largely been phased out by successive generations of chips, including Raptor Lake (13^th/14^th Gen Core), and more recently, Intel’s Arrow Lake chips. So it is a bit surprising to see IceWhale deploying an older Intel SoC here, especially as Intel EOL’d the chip last year and ceased shipments in October.

In any case, the i5-1235U is one of the higher-end configurations of the Alder Lake-P silicon. It offers two performance (P) cores based on the Golden Cove architecture and eight efficiency (E) cores based on Gracemont, with the former topping out at 4.4GHz. The chip is also paired with a relatively powerful iGPU, Intel’s Iris Xe Graphics, which features an 80 EU GPU based on the Xe-LP architecture. This is a rather dated GPU architecture at this point, but it does support HEVC encoding, which is always helpful for a NAS box.

As noted earlier, the Intel SoC is being fed with 16GB of DDR5-4800 memory. IceWhale’s system comes with two SO-DIMM slots, both populated, so while it is somewhat light on memory, it is expandable in the future.

Overall, the CPU performance of the system is unremarkable thanks to the older CPU architecture combined with modest clock speeds. This chip was originally meant for thin-and-light laptops, so it prioritizes power efficiency over performance. This has been mounted in a decent-sized NAS, so the ZimaCube’s cooling system has little trouble keeping the chip cool. Instead, the big reason to pick this particular chip SKU is the number of PCIe lanes available. Alder Lake-P offers eight PCIe Gen4 lanes coming from the CPU, as well as another 12 PCIe Gen3 lanes coming from the PCH. All 20 of those PCIe lanes are put to good use by IceWhale in order to drive the SSDs, PCIe slots, and other add-ons.

Geekbench CPU

For our performance comparison, we have selected Minisforum’s N5 Pro, a 5 bay NAS. The N5 Pro is based on a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, one of AMD’s recent high-power mobile offerings. While it is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, it is pretty close for the size and intended use case of the box.

The Geekbench 6 CPU results are as expected. The Core i5-1235U in the ZimaCube still puts up a fight with single-threaded performance, coming within 20% of the Ryzen AI 300 chip in the N5 Pro. However, it falls behind significantly in multithreaded performance.

The story is much the same with Geekbench 5 as well.

The Core i5-1235U at the heart of the ZimaCube 2 Pro is still reasonably performant, but it is not a high-performance chip by any means. This makes it a good choice for running a bunch of lightweight services, which is exactly what ZimaOS is doing, but beyond that, this is a box designed to maximize the amount of I/O bandwidth available, not to do a bunch of heavy computational work.

We should also note that for a 6-10 bay NAS, an Intel N355 is a perfectly reasonable solution, and is a lower-end version of this generation of chips with less I/O. Traditional NAS workloads are notorious for using very little CPU.