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It appears the worldwide element disaster has skyrocketed the costs of storage to the purpose the place some alternative routes of using a NAS have popped up. YouTube PC fanatic TrashBench not too long ago took a ZimaCube 2 NAS and modded it right into a gaming PC, pushed by an RTX 5060 graphics card. Despite the low-power laptop computer CPU contained in the server, the outcomes nonetheless confirmed an astronomical enchancment in gaming efficiency throughout the board, enhancing body charges by 828% in some exams and breaking the Time Spy world document for the Intel Core i5-1235U CPU.
For context, the ZimaCube 2 is powered by an Intel Core i5-1235U CPU, which is an Alder Lake chip that includes simply two P-cores and eight E-cores, alongside Iris Xe built-in graphics. The iGPU is weak as a result of that is all that is wanted for a server (if it is wanted in any respect). This system was by no means supposed for gaming, however the motherboard inside has a vacant PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, making this NAS the proper candidate to be liberated by some questionable mods.
At first, the exams confirmed the iGPU hitting round 18 FPS in Hitman 3 on 1080p with low settings. Cyberpunk 2077 was even worse with simply 13 FPS, whereas Shadow of the Tomb Raider was essentially the most promising title, attaining 31 FPS. Putting an AMD Radeon Pro WX5100 workstation GPU (a cut-down version of the RX 480) in the board’s slot helped raise the numbers a bit, around 40% on average, but the updated performance was still not enough to be classified as playable.
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TrashBench proceeded to connect an RTX 5060 to the x16 slot with a riser cable and just let it hang outside the case, since the card was way too big to fit inside. Of course, this wasn’t ideal and would restrict airflow quite a bit, so he devised a 3D-printed frame that would hold the GPU in place, while zip-tying the other end to the case directly. The final result might not exactly look polished, but it was firm enough to conduct benchmarks.
Keep in mind that all this jury-rigging was possible due to the ZimaCube’s unique design. The chassis has large cutouts across its chassis, allowing the riser cable to easily protrude from the left. To power the RTX 5060, TrashBench removed all the hard drive caddies so that the system’s drive bay was left completely empty. He then fit a 750W SFX power supply inside with an extension cable that ran up to the GPU’s power connector. The front cover of this NAS is magnetic, so everything was nicely hidden behind it.
TrashBench’s retesting showed Hitman 3 running at 167 FPS on average, which is an 827% improvement over the stock 18 FPS, or more than nine times faster. Similarly, Cyberpunk 2077 got a 7x boost, going from 13 FPS to 90 FPS. Framerates in Shadow of the Tomb Raider “only” quadrupled, as the RTX 5060 achieved an average of 124 FPS compared to 31 FPS with the iGPU.
TrashBench didn’t stop there and, true to his nature, wanted to freeze the CPU to try and see if he could get even better results. The issue was that the chip never throttled to begin with, and the GPU was already bottlenecked, so running an antifreeze loop actually worsened performance. The silicon designed to run a storage server had achieved its maximum potential.
Unfortunately, this variant of the ZimaCube 2 does value $1,299 to begin with so that you’re a lot better off simply constructing a daily PC even in the present day. It additionally would not include Windows, and the BIOS was by no means configured to run a devoted GPU, so it’s a must to all the time have one thing plugged into the iGPU’s show output for the dGPU to show something. Still, as a wild experiment, we are able to name this one successful.
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