I picked up a Zotac ZBOX CI325 off eBay because I kept seeing these things everywhere and figured I was missing something. On paper, it looked awesome for homelab roles: dual gigabit NICs, tiny footprint, and a 6W Intel Celeron N3160. Once I got it on the bench, I found a few surprises—like it booting straight into Windows, hidden internal storage, and a massive passive heatsink that makes it completely silent. But I also found out it’s kind of a pain to work on, because the heatsink is screwed into the case… meaning you have to pull it (and redo thermal paste) just to access the board and swap drives. Performance-wise, Windows was rough. Even basic desktop stuff felt sluggish and the CPU was pegged constantly, and the benchmarks were about as low as I’ve ever recorded. Linux Mint was noticeably better (especially after I bumped it to 8GB of RAM), and the real win here ended up being low power draw—around 7W idle, and I got it down to roughly 4W in Proxmox with a few tweaks. I tested a bunch of roles: OPNSense router (Realtek NICs, some quirks), Proxmox with Home Assistant and Uptime Kuma, and even some retro emulation and media streaming. My takeaway: it’s not a great budget desktop or streaming box, but if you find one cheap enough, it can be a solid little always-on box for light homelab jobs.