The Zima Cube is… GOOD now? [ft. Zima Cube Pro]

after buying a zima board out from the hype and seing videos from their other products I can confirm that all the zima lineup it's just cool looking poor designed little computer that offer nothing but worse value than a mini itx pc or any other mini pc.
I don't know what I was thinking when I bought the zima board, to use it as the center of my homelab I guess I just wanted something that uses little energy but had more power and expansion than a raspberry pi (I have the big boy that virtualize windows machines that I use for gaming as well that I shut down when not needed), but now I'm facing all the limitations like soldered ram, 1gb ethernet, etc..
This is certainly more expandible and flexible but when you think about it, it is just an horrible mess of a device. a motherboard, CPU, ram and PSU with a 1235u amount of performance will get you much further and cost you a third of the price.

A wireless adapter inside a metal case. Very smart.

"12th gen intel i5 isn't great now, it's been a few years"

my homelab is entirely 7th gen i3s and i5s and one 8th gen celeron, lol

granted, I probably paid less than $1100 for everything in this room including hard drives

the hardware haven intro song feels like im hyperventalating after running a 10k and my chest is gonna fill up with nitrus oxide and impode from within

The Zima Cube pro still feels like a beta build. Having no kind information on the motherboard's I/O shield, the need to replace the CPU, and the lack of detail on the small things, doesn't convince me that the Zima Cube Pro, is a "Pro" device.

What does alcoholic sprite have to do with computers?

The biggest use-case for WMR was inside-out tracking. Even when the Rift S and Quest came out, WMR had better headsets.

Finally a Colten video!

4 M.2 drives all at 1 lane each while only giving the same peak throughput as a single NVMe is going to have better sustained performance from more caching capacity with consumer SSDs, so there's that.

The new 45HomeLabs HL8 fully kitted out is comperable price-wise but a way stronger option, imo.

I think the default setting for all companies is "greed" first. They don't want you to have an upgrade path that doesn't include giving them more of your money. The only way we as consumers will EVER get the best of all worlds is a company that doesn't default to greed first, and that will just never happen in this current system of things. Perhaps the only way would be a non profit, but would that non profit even survive very long? Not without making enough money to keep making products lots of people want. If that non profit starts having money issues, will they just disappear or switch over to "greed mode" to survive?

No ECC memory

Like i've been saying ever since the i3-N300 ahnd N305 launched
There is a huge difference between single channel 16GB soft limit with 9 lanes of PCIe 3.0
And dual channel up to 256GB and 20 lanes of 3.0/4.0 found on the i3-1215u
The alderlake N really should have never carried the i3 name, and it especially should have never carried the $309 CSP of the 1215U

way over priced for what it is

Thanks for realising that, at least for us Europeans, 55 watts isn't nothing – although it is acceptable if it's not just purely an occasional media server. My unraid box is primarily Home Assistant but also Plex and totally legal downloading and idles at 26w running an i5 4590T (passively cooled), 32GB DDR3, 4 x 4TB HDD with 1TB SSD cache (so the HDDs only spin up when serving media).