Turned A ZimaBoard 2 Into A Steam Machine
Pure curiosity project this one. I had the ZimaBoard 2 and the Intel Arc A380 sitting on the desk, so I did the obvious daft thing — dropped the graphics card into the ZimaBoard's PCI slot, installed SteamOS, and tried to turn a…
Pure curiosity project this one. I had the ZimaBoard 2 and the Intel Arc A380 sitting on the desk, so I did the obvious daft thing — dropped the graphics card into the ZimaBoard's PCI slot, installed SteamOS, and tried to turn a fanless home lab board into a Steam machine. Does it work? Yes. Should you do it? That's more complicated.
THE HARDWARE
You can get a Zimaboard 2 here
Zimaboard 2 purchase link: https://bit.ly/4dDoM5h
Amazon UK: https://bit.ly/4u9l0FQ
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The ZimaBoard 2 has an Intel N150 — only four CPU cores. It's a brilliant home lab and server board but it was never meant for gaming. It comes with 16GB RAM and a 64GB eMMC. Adding the A380 gives the GPU side more grunt than a Steam Deck, but you're stuck with that four-core CPU and slow eMMC storage. So this sits in a weird place — fine for GPU-bound games, hopeless for anything CPU-heavy.
Worth noting — the N150 actually has Intel Xe graphics built in, same Alchemist stack as the Arc cards. But SteamOS detects the iGPU as i915, not Xe, so the onboard graphics won't work with Steam. You need the discrete Xe-detected A380 for it to play ball.
WHAT PLAYS
Loading is slow because my games drive is on USB 2 here and the eMMC is no speed demon. But once games load, plenty are perfectly playable.
Hades runs great. Black Mesa played fine. The Talos Principle hit 60 FPS at high settings. Portal runs easily. Older and indie titles are where this shines — anything that isn't hammering the CPU.
Call of Duty Black Ops was juddery. Homeworld 3 managed 26 FPS on the lowest settings and Black Myth Wukong choked at 5 FPS. Triple-A titles are a no-go. The four cores are the bottleneck, not just the GPU.
THE OCULINK OPTION
They do sell an Oculink eGPU adapter for the ZimaBoard, so you could attach a more powerful card. But it won't fix the core count — whatever GPU you bolt on, you're still stuck behind four CPU cores. For CPU-bound games that's a hard ceiling.
WOULD AN AMD CARD BE BETTER
Probably. Some low-profile AMD RX cards draw power straight from the PCI slot and would fit a build like this. And crucially, FSR works properly on AMD in a way it doesn't seem to on the Intel Arc cards here — I'm not convinced FSR is doing much on the A380. So you'd likely squeeze more frames out of an AMD card. Still won't rescue you on CPU-heavy titles, but for the games this can run, it'd help.
THE POINT
A ZimaBoard 2 is about 299 quid. Drop a cheap card in and you've technically got a Steam box. Is that what Ice Whale envisaged? Almost certainly not. But it's doable, and it means your home lab board has a life beyond just being a server. Think like a Steam Deck — indie games, older titles, single-player stuff — and it's genuinely fun.
I'll be wiping this and putting it back to media server duty, but it was a laugh proving it works. If you've got a ZimaBoard gathering dust as a headless box, it can moonlight as a little gaming machine when you fancy it.
ABOUT THIS CHANNEL
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00:00 - Start
00:06 - INTRO
03:35 - STEAM OS
04:40 - GAMING
13:50 - final words