A modder has turned a six-bay NAS unit into a capable gaming PC by boosting its graphics performance using a dedicated RTX 5060 GPU, claiming a 3DMark world record into the bargain.
Made by TrashBench on YouTube, this mod is based on a ZimaCube 2 NAS powered by an Intel Core i5-1235U CPU and 16GB of SO-DIMM DDR5 memory. By default, the system’s tiny Iris Xe Graphics is barely capable of running any games, even at 1080p low, delivering 18fps in Hitman 3, 13fps in Cyberpunk 2077, and 31fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This is all understandable since a NAS is designed to store and transfer data at high speeds, not play 3D games.
Enhancing its gaming chops by installing a dedicated gaming GPU wasn’t straightforward, mind. Turns out, while the ZimaCube 2 features a PCIe 4.0 x4 slot, its enclosure is too short to fit a full-size graphics card. Because of this, the only viable solution was to either buy a compact graphics card like Gigabyte’s low-profile RTX 5060 or install the card outside of the chassis. TrashBench went with the second option and positioned a standard RTX 5060 on the side nearest to the PCIe slot, linking the two using a riser cable.
Since the RTX 5060 requires at least an 8-pin power cable and about 145W of power, both of which this NAS lacked, the modder installed an auxiliary PSU. Once more, due to the lack of a dedicated PSU slot, TrashBench had no choice but to remove the unusable 3.5in drive bays, which left just enough room for a 750W SFX PSU. Complicated, huh?
With the NAS ready to rock, the results were more impressive, boosting frame rates to 167fps in Hitman 3, 90fps in Cyberpunk 2077, and 124fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This respectively represents an x8, x7, and x4 increase in performance compared to the puny integrated GPU. Interestingly enough, upgrading the GPU to a vastly more powerful RTX 4080 Super didn’t net any further improvement. Perhaps the RTX 4080 has more CPU overhead, which, as a reminder, only packs 2 P-cores plus 8 E-cores on this NAS.
In fact, when running Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the RTX 5060 was barely using 60% of its potential, according to the monitoring data. Despite that, this contraption helped the modder secure the first spot in the 3DMark Night Raid benchmark for this CPU category.
But it wouldn’t be a TrashBench video if it didn’t involve some ludicrous cooling system. They tried to cool the CPU using iced water in the hope of alleviating some of the CPU bottleneck. Unfortunately, the gains were zero, or worse in some instances, where performance dropped by 10% in Hitman 3.
While this shows that NAS boxes can game given enough GPU horsepower, considering the bare-bones unit costs $1,299, to which you will need to add a GPU and PSU, it doesn’t make sense. Furthermore, the modder noted that the machine’s BIOS wasn’t designed for dedicated graphics cards, requiring the video output signal to be routed through the iGPU out of the motherboard’s HDMI port. Nevertheless, this was a nice, interesting experiment, showing that NAS units are just PCs optimised for storage.
