GoKawiilIt seems the global component crisis has skyrocketed the prices of storage to the point where some alternative ways of utilizing a NAS have popped up. YouTube PC enthusiast TrashBench recently took a ZimaCube 2 NAS and modded it into a gaming PC, driven by an RTX 5060 graphics card. Despite the low-power laptop CPU inside the server, the results still showed an astronomical improvement in gaming performance across the board, improving frame rates by 828% in some tests and breaking the Time Spy world record for the Intel Core i5-1235U CPU.
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For context, the ZimaCube 2 is powered by an Intel Core i5-1235U CPU, which is an Alder Lake chip featuring just two P-cores and eight E-cores, alongside Iris Xe integrated graphics. The iGPU is weak because that's all that's needed for a server (if it's needed at all). This system was never intended for gaming, but the motherboard inside has a vacant PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, making this NAS the perfect candidate to be liberated by some questionable mods.
At first, the tests showed the iGPU hitting around 18 FPS in Hitman 3 on 1080p with low settings. Cyberpunk 2077 was even worse with just 13 FPS, while Shadow of the Tomb Raider was the most promising title, achieving 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.
(Image credit: TrashBench on YouTube)
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.
(Image credit: TrashBench on YouTube)
(Image credit: TrashBench on YouTube)
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