The Zimablade Is A Low-cost X86 SBC With A PCIe Slot & Retro Emu Support.

**Exploring the Zema Blade: A Comprehensive Review**

**Introduction**

The Zema Blade, brought to us by the creators of the original Zima board, is a new x86 single-board computer (SBC) that has been making waves in the tech community. In this detailed review, we'll take an in-depth look at its features, performance, and capabilities based on ETA Prime's thorough examination.

**Hardware Specifications**

The Zema Blade is powered by Intel processors, offering three CPU variants with options ranging from dual-core to quad-core configurations. The model reviewed features the Intel Celeron J3455, a quad-core processor boosting up to 2.3 GHz. It supports up to 16 GB of single-channel DDR3 RAM and includes 32 GB of built-in eMMC storage, pre-installed with Casa OS Linux.

The board boasts a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot, allowing for expansion possibilities such as adding an m.2 adapter, SATA drives, network cards, or even a GPU, albeit at reduced speeds due to the PCIe 2.0 limitation. Storage options include two SATA 3.0 ports and a mini DisplayPort 1.2 supporting 4K/60Hz output. Additionally, it features USB 3.0 and USB Type-C ports for versatile connectivity.

**Design and Build Quality**

ETA Prime was impressed by the sleek design of the Zema Blade, housed in a passive-cooled metal case that enhances thermal efficiency without compromising on aesthetics. The build quality is sturdy, with all components securely integrated, making it an attractive option for both functionality and form.

**Initial Setup and Casa OS Experience**

Upon unboxing, the Zema Blade comes with Casa OS Linux pre-installed. While this OS offers a user-friendly interface and remote access capabilities via a web browser, ETA Prime opted to explore alternatives by installing Ubuntu 22.04. Despite initial concerns about compatibility due to the older Intel chipset, Ubuntu运行顺畅，展现了令人惊喜的性能。

**Ubuntu Installation and Usage**

Wiping the eMMC storage and installing Ubuntu revealed a system that performed better than expected. Although the Celeron J3455 is an older processor, it handled everyday tasks efficiently. The choice of desktop environment significantly impacted performance; GNOME exhibited occasional stutters, leading ETA Prime to suggest lighter options like LXDE for optimal experience.

**Performance Testing**

1. **Web Browsing and Video Playback**: Navigating the web and streaming videos on YouTube proved smooth, with minimal buffering or lag, especially at 720p resolution. Hardware acceleration in Chrome further enhanced video playback quality.

2. **Gaming**: Testing OpenArena, a game known for its high performance requirements, showed steady playability at around 90 FPS, a marked improvement over Raspberry Pi alternatives.

3. **Emulation**: PSP emulation using the Vulcan backend ran smoothly at 2x resolution, while God of War Chains of Olympus posed challenges, necessitating downscaling to maintain full speed. Dolphin Emulator for GameCube struggled due to an older driver version, highlighting the potential benefits of a newer build.

**Power Consumption**

The Zema Blade excelled in power efficiency, drawing only 4 watts at idle and peaking at around 13 watts during intensive tasks. This low power draw makes it an ideal choice for energy-efficient setups.

**Final Thoughts**

Despite its limitations, such as the use of DDR3 RAM and older Intel chipset, the Zema Blade delivers impressive performance for its price point, particularly when utilized as a single-board server or for light gaming and emulation. Priced at $64 for the base model (dual-core) and $96 for the quad-core variant, it offers excellent value.

**Conclusion**

The Zema Blade is a commendable entry into the x86 SBC market, offering versatility and performance that exceeds initial expectations. Whether for server tasks, light gaming, or retro emulation, its capabilities are noteworthy. For further insights or specific configurations, exploring resources like Nova Spirit's channel can provide deeper understanding.

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This structured article provides a comprehensive overview of the Zema Blade, transforming the transcription into an organized, engaging read while preserving all essential details from ETA Prime's review.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at a brand new x86 single board computer from the creator of the original zema board this is the zema blade and it was recently up on crowd Supply base model actually only goes for $64 and I'm really interested to see how this thing performs so basically what we have here is an Intel powered x86 single board computer you add your own Ram with this we do have built-in emmc storage and they're offering three different CPU variants I'll leave a link to their website in the description but one of the most interesting things here is we have a pcie slot now it's a pcie 2.0 X4 slot but we can add a ton of different peripherals to this like extra USB we can add an m.2 adapter or more SATA drives network cards and even a GPU now remember this is pcie 2.0 X4 so if you did connect a GPU it's not going to run it full speed but it's totally possible to connect it to this slot and along with the pcie interface over here on this side we've actually got two SATA 3.0 6 gig ports moving over to the other side mini display port 1.2 this will do 4K 60 out gigabit Ethernet we also have a full-size USB 3.0 port and USB type-c this will transfer power data and display so it's full function USBC personally I think the board itself looks really good inside of this case and it's totally passively cooled by the metal case that comes included with it now one thing that kind of threw me off here was actually the ram we're going to utilize because initially I was under the impression that we'd be using ddr4 here unfortunately it's only DDR3 and they did this to keep the cost down because DDR3 is really cheap right now used on eBay and this will support up to 16 gigs when it comes to the specs of the zma board they're actually offering two different variants right now at the time of making this video but we've got the higher end variant with the quadcore Intel Celeron j3455 it's got a boost up to 2.3 GHz Intel 500hd graphics with 12 execution units and it'll run it up to 750 MHz we can do up to 16 GB of single Channel DDR3 it's got 32 GB of emmc storage built in with Casa OS Linux pre-installed but we could go with Windows or another variant of Linux and in this video we're going to take a quick look at Casa OS because we are tested that on the original zimma board I'm just going to install Ubuntu right on this thing and see what we can do with it and they're marketing this thing as a single board server which it would work out great for given the lower specs here low power draw but I wanted to see if we could use this as an everyday x86 SVC for emulation a little bit of gaming some web browsing and video playback if you're interested in checking out what this thing can do as a server I would highly recommend heading over to Nova Spirit text YouTube channel I'll leave a link in the description check out his review he's going to go over a lot of different things that I won't end this video so accessing the zimma board with cassa OS installed from any other PC is actually really simple you're just going to open up a browser type in your IP as long as you're on the same network and if you set everything up correctly you can access this remotely I've just got it set up on my home network just makes it a lot easier to get into and uh right now I'm just connected from another PC really nice little interface gives us our RAM usage CPU usage it'll also show us the wattage and Celsius here widget settings we can go ahead and disable some of these if we don't want to see them and we can remotely install different applications directly from here going into our files we've got our downloads you can set up different directories if you need to basically we're just kind of jacked in to this over Network and if I've got anything on the zimma board be on the internal emmc an m.2 over that pcie slot or even SATA drives connected I can access it from here very easily really like the interface super easy to use use we've got tons of different applications that we can install and use if we need to all the information we need is on screen at any given time this is actually really awesome they've set this up very nicely I'm actually starting to enjoy using Casa OS like I mentioned this operating system comes pre-installed on the MMC storage but I actually just went ahead and wiped it after a little while and installed Ubuntu because we've taken a look at Kasa OS on the original zimma board I just wanted to check out Ubuntu with the gnome desktop on this thing okay so I just went through and wiped the emmc I've installed Ubuntu 2204 basa OS is pre-installed on top of Debian you know right out of the box I just really wanted to check out obuntu here and overall it's actually a lot faster than I thought it would be now the main drawback here is going to be the chipset they opted to use it's the 3455 so it's an older Intel chip but for a lighter operating system it's actually not that bad now I wouldn't suggest using gnome there is a little bit of stutter here and there with this uh desktop interface you could go with lxde or something like that to lighten it up a bit but it's not too bad so with this setup here I just went through I installed a few things that we're going to be testing out but one of the main things I wanted to see was just some web browsing and video playback from YouTube I am on ethernet we don't have built-in Wi-Fi so we'll just head over to their website here nothing's going to be fast forward this is going to be real time just so we can get a feel for how this thing performs and yeah it's actually loads up pretty quick Let's uh head over to the order now page so the base model of this board is $64 and with that it actually has a dual core Intel CPU you can still add up to 16 GB of DDR3 for the one we're taking a look at is actually 96 and $88 shipping there still not too bad for what we're getting here let's check out some YouTube video playback and yeah it did take a second to get everything populated lots of images here and we'll go with a good old Linux test here okay so we'll go stats for nerds already got a few drop frames there make sure we are at 1080 so we'll go to 720 to reset that 1080 10860 and we'll see what happens so stats for nerds is listed on screen and we already got a few drop frames unfortunately even with Hardware acceleration and chrome enabled looks like this little chip is struggling with 1080p 60 it's not as bad as some little x86 boards on the market right now but it would be nice to have a nice steady 60fps 1080 with this setup next thing I wanted to test here was open arena now I usually test this on Lower n x86 boards we'll just go with the demo FPS should be up in the top right hand corner and just to put this into perspective for you the uh Raspberry Pi 4 runs this at about 41 FPS the same exact test the Raspberry Pi 5 did hit 60 but with this I think it might be locked at 90 FPS for some odd reason I don't think we're going to go over that but it looks like in some cases it could definitely go over yeah I think it's locked right there at 90 either way it's very playable on this machine and I kind of suspected it would be we've got a much more power power ful chip than the arm chip in the Raspberry Pi 4 and like I mentioned that runs it at 41 FPS okay so the next thing we're going to be testing out here is some emulation I've got some PSP and some Gamecube if this works out I was actually thinking about installing just a retro operating system on this like bosera let's go with PSP see if we can get this full screen and the first one we're going to be testing here is Ratchet and Clank with this I'm going to go to 2x resolution we're using the Vulcan backend no frame skip or anything like that and this is one of those games that ran natively at 30 FPS kind of thought we'd have some good performance with this we even might be able to go up to 3x with these type of games you know this one is a bit easier to run and it does look pretty decent at 2X but of course when it comes to PSP emulation on any single board computer there is one game that really struggles on a lot of the lower-end stuff and that's going to be God of War chains of Olympus Vulcan back in and with Ratchet and Clank we were at 2x resolution I had to drop this down to 1x to get it to run at full speed no hacks again just like that first game we tested but we're at a steady 60 I saw it dip down to 58 and 1 case and that was just kind of a stutter there but when it comes to PSP emulation on this little board it actually functions very very well and the final thing I wanted to test here was the Dolphin Emulator for some GameCube but unfortunately it looks like the development PPA isn't available uh at least for 22.4 oon 2 and um I have to rely on this older 5.0 version and with this we only have access to openg GL so performance isn't going to be great here I can go with the newer version on a different drro and uh you know checking out a retro emulation operating system for this would actually be really awesome so if you're interested in seeing something like that let me know but let's get in here and it looks like I also lost sound here not getting great performance where at the native resolution and I know a newer version would definitely help out I mean this version is I think a couple years old now so obviously with all of the updates they've done we could definitely see some good performance but unfortunately I'm just not really going to be able to test dolphin to its full potential in this video but just seeing how this older version runs we could probably do some of these easier to emulate games with a newer version at full speed the final thing I wanted to talk about here was total system power consumption so while running all of these tests I had this plugged into a kilowatt meter and at idle it only pulls four Watts with the operating system I'm using gaming and 1080p playback it jumps up to 10 actually 9.8 and the maximum that I saw this draw from the wall was 13 Watts now keep in mind I don't have any SATA drives or pcie connected to this it could probably pull more but the way it sits right now it's a very low power consumption Mini PC so in the end the zema blade actually performed much better than I thought it was going to now it would be nice to have a more powerful CPU and uh utilize ddr4 here but this is what we have for $96 on the one we tested here or you could go with the lower-end dual core version for 64 there's a few more things I'd like to test on this like adding a GPU over that PCI E slot and if that's something you'd like to see definitely let me know in the comments below but if you're interested in learning a little more I'll leave some links to their official website in the description but that's going to wrap it up for this video definitely stay tuned to the channel because I will have a little more coming with this and like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at a brand new x86 single board computer from the creator of the original zema board this is the zema blade and it was recently up on crowd Supply base model actually only goes for $64 and I'm really interested to see how this thing performs so basically what we have here is an Intel powered x86 single board computer you add your own Ram with this we do have built-in emmc storage and they're offering three different CPU variants I'll leave a link to their website in the description but one of the most interesting things here is we have a pcie slot now it's a pcie 2.0 X4 slot but we can add a ton of different peripherals to this like extra USB we can add an m.2 adapter or more SATA drives network cards and even a GPU now remember this is pcie 2.0 X4 so if you did connect a GPU it's not going to run it full speed but it's totally possible to connect it to this slot and along with the pcie interface over here on this side we've actually got two SATA 3.0 6 gig ports moving over to the other side mini display port 1.2 this will do 4K 60 out gigabit Ethernet we also have a full-size USB 3.0 port and USB type-c this will transfer power data and display so it's full function USBC personally I think the board itself looks really good inside of this case and it's totally passively cooled by the metal case that comes included with it now one thing that kind of threw me off here was actually the ram we're going to utilize because initially I was under the impression that we'd be using ddr4 here unfortunately it's only DDR3 and they did this to keep the cost down because DDR3 is really cheap right now used on eBay and this will support up to 16 gigs when it comes to the specs of the zma board they're actually offering two different variants right now at the time of making this video but we've got the higher end variant with the quadcore Intel Celeron j3455 it's got a boost up to 2.3 GHz Intel 500hd graphics with 12 execution units and it'll run it up to 750 MHz we can do up to 16 GB of single Channel DDR3 it's got 32 GB of emmc storage built in with Casa OS Linux pre-installed but we could go with Windows or another variant of Linux and in this video we're going to take a quick look at Casa OS because we are tested that on the original zimma board I'm just going to install Ubuntu right on this thing and see what we can do with it and they're marketing this thing as a single board server which it would work out great for given the lower specs here low power draw but I wanted to see if we could use this as an everyday x86 SVC for emulation a little bit of gaming some web browsing and video playback if you're interested in checking out what this thing can do as a server I would highly recommend heading over to Nova Spirit text YouTube channel I'll leave a link in the description check out his review he's going to go over a lot of different things that I won't end this video so accessing the zimma board with cassa OS installed from any other PC is actually really simple you're just going to open up a browser type in your IP as long as you're on the same network and if you set everything up correctly you can access this remotely I've just got it set up on my home network just makes it a lot easier to get into and uh right now I'm just connected from another PC really nice little interface gives us our RAM usage CPU usage it'll also show us the wattage and Celsius here widget settings we can go ahead and disable some of these if we don't want to see them and we can remotely install different applications directly from here going into our files we've got our downloads you can set up different directories if you need to basically we're just kind of jacked in to this over Network and if I've got anything on the zimma board be on the internal emmc an m.2 over that pcie slot or even SATA drives connected I can access it from here very easily really like the interface super easy to use use we've got tons of different applications that we can install and use if we need to all the information we need is on screen at any given time this is actually really awesome they've set this up very nicely I'm actually starting to enjoy using Casa OS like I mentioned this operating system comes pre-installed on the MMC storage but I actually just went ahead and wiped it after a little while and installed Ubuntu because we've taken a look at Kasa OS on the original zimma board I just wanted to check out Ubuntu with the gnome desktop on this thing okay so I just went through and wiped the emmc I've installed Ubuntu 2204 basa OS is pre-installed on top of Debian you know right out of the box I just really wanted to check out obuntu here and overall it's actually a lot faster than I thought it would be now the main drawback here is going to be the chipset they opted to use it's the 3455 so it's an older Intel chip but for a lighter operating system it's actually not that bad now I wouldn't suggest using gnome there is a little bit of stutter here and there with this uh desktop interface you could go with lxde or something like that to lighten it up a bit but it's not too bad so with this setup here I just went through I installed a few things that we're going to be testing out but one of the main things I wanted to see was just some web browsing and video playback from YouTube I am on ethernet we don't have built-in Wi-Fi so we'll just head over to their website here nothing's going to be fast forward this is going to be real time just so we can get a feel for how this thing performs and yeah it's actually loads up pretty quick Let's uh head over to the order now page so the base model of this board is $64 and with that it actually has a dual core Intel CPU you can still add up to 16 GB of DDR3 for the one we're taking a look at is actually 96 and $88 shipping there still not too bad for what we're getting here let's check out some YouTube video playback and yeah it did take a second to get everything populated lots of images here and we'll go with a good old Linux test here okay so we'll go stats for nerds already got a few drop frames there make sure we are at 1080 so we'll go to 720 to reset that 1080 10860 and we'll see what happens so stats for nerds is listed on screen and we already got a few drop frames unfortunately even with Hardware acceleration and chrome enabled looks like this little chip is struggling with 1080p 60 it's not as bad as some little x86 boards on the market right now but it would be nice to have a nice steady 60fps 1080 with this setup next thing I wanted to test here was open arena now I usually test this on Lower n x86 boards we'll just go with the demo FPS should be up in the top right hand corner and just to put this into perspective for you the uh Raspberry Pi 4 runs this at about 41 FPS the same exact test the Raspberry Pi 5 did hit 60 but with this I think it might be locked at 90 FPS for some odd reason I don't think we're going to go over that but it looks like in some cases it could definitely go over yeah I think it's locked right there at 90 either way it's very playable on this machine and I kind of suspected it would be we've got a much more power power ful chip than the arm chip in the Raspberry Pi 4 and like I mentioned that runs it at 41 FPS okay so the next thing we're going to be testing out here is some emulation I've got some PSP and some Gamecube if this works out I was actually thinking about installing just a retro operating system on this like bosera let's go with PSP see if we can get this full screen and the first one we're going to be testing here is Ratchet and Clank with this I'm going to go to 2x resolution we're using the Vulcan backend no frame skip or anything like that and this is one of those games that ran natively at 30 FPS kind of thought we'd have some good performance with this we even might be able to go up to 3x with these type of games you know this one is a bit easier to run and it does look pretty decent at 2X but of course when it comes to PSP emulation on any single board computer there is one game that really struggles on a lot of the lower-end stuff and that's going to be God of War chains of Olympus Vulcan back in and with Ratchet and Clank we were at 2x resolution I had to drop this down to 1x to get it to run at full speed no hacks again just like that first game we tested but we're at a steady 60 I saw it dip down to 58 and 1 case and that was just kind of a stutter there but when it comes to PSP emulation on this little board it actually functions very very well and the final thing I wanted to test here was the Dolphin Emulator for some GameCube but unfortunately it looks like the development PPA isn't available uh at least for 22.4 oon 2 and um I have to rely on this older 5.0 version and with this we only have access to openg GL so performance isn't going to be great here I can go with the newer version on a different drro and uh you know checking out a retro emulation operating system for this would actually be really awesome so if you're interested in seeing something like that let me know but let's get in here and it looks like I also lost sound here not getting great performance where at the native resolution and I know a newer version would definitely help out I mean this version is I think a couple years old now so obviously with all of the updates they've done we could definitely see some good performance but unfortunately I'm just not really going to be able to test dolphin to its full potential in this video but just seeing how this older version runs we could probably do some of these easier to emulate games with a newer version at full speed the final thing I wanted to talk about here was total system power consumption so while running all of these tests I had this plugged into a kilowatt meter and at idle it only pulls four Watts with the operating system I'm using gaming and 1080p playback it jumps up to 10 actually 9.8 and the maximum that I saw this draw from the wall was 13 Watts now keep in mind I don't have any SATA drives or pcie connected to this it could probably pull more but the way it sits right now it's a very low power consumption Mini PC so in the end the zema blade actually performed much better than I thought it was going to now it would be nice to have a more powerful CPU and uh utilize ddr4 here but this is what we have for $96 on the one we tested here or you could go with the lower-end dual core version for 64 there's a few more things I'd like to test on this like adding a GPU over that PCI E slot and if that's something you'd like to see definitely let me know in the comments below but if you're interested in learning a little more I'll leave some links to their official website in the description but that's going to wrap it up for this video definitely stay tuned to the channel because I will have a little more coming with this and like always thanks for watching\n"