All-in-one PC by stefan @ 2014-10-20
The mini PC kit ECS has offered is shipped in a DIY format, and incorporates a dual-core Intel Celeron processor, 2GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage. The footprint of the product allows us to carry it anywhere and it can be even powered by an USB powerbank, if it can deliver at least 2.1 A.
At first we would like to thank ECS for offering me their LIVA Mini PC Kit solution for testing and reviewing.
"ECS, the Elitegroup Computer Systems, was established in 1987, and is approaching its 23rd year of business. More than two decades, ECS has overcome a great deal of obstacles facing new businesses and has experienced the joy of significant growth and development. Her main focus has expanded to not only motherboards, but also desktop and notebook computers, graphics cards and other mobile products. ECS is strongly committed to develop cutting-edge technology in order to generate innovative products under environmental friendly designs. ECS comprehensive system of quality control provides our clients with reassurance and fosters long term cooperation.
Green Touch, Good Life
ECS commits to protect the Earth by reducing the global environmental loading as the priority of her corporate sustainable strategy. Confronting more and more global environmental impacts; climate change, natural resources depletion and the crisis of ecological imbalance, ECS devotes the Green Solutions for the Earth sustainable development without compromising customer satisfaction. ECS expects bringing people with more Green Touch for a Good Life.
Starting from 2006, ECS has been implementing the “ECS Green Competitive Advantage and Quality Plan” and introduced Green Products through 4-stages of non-toxic management; including non-toxic suppliers, non-toxic material, non-toxic manufacturing & processing, and, non-toxic quality controls. Besides, ECS is recognized under the IECQQC080000 Certification in her two major manufacturing sites in China; Golden Elite Technology at Shenzhen and ESZ at Suzhou. That empowers ECS desire of providing end users with HSF (Hazardous Substance Free) products to ensure a quality green life.
As a top-down decision, ECS dedicates to offering clean and environmentally friendly computer products for consumers through product design, purchase, production, sale and services to the 3R environmental objectives – Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The ECS engineering teams are engaged to create products under a Green concept by size reduction, product longevity, easy disassembly, recycle potential, substance restriction and energy saving. For example, ECS green motherboards apply to the three environmental directives – the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) promoted by the European Union; RoHS (Restriction on Hazardous Substance Directive) and EuP (Eco design of Energy-using Products Directive).
Nowadays, ECS integrates Green concept in her daily operation. From the headquarters on Taiwan to worldwide branches, ECS practices energy saving, water recycling, Green data center, planting and so on to reduce greenhouse gas emission for mitigating the climate change. With continuous efforts to conduct business in a sustainable way, ECS recognizes that we are dependent on the Earth and strive to improve the quality of life for people everywhere!
Global Network
The headquarters of ECS is located in Taipei Neihu Technology Park. We have offices in major cities around the world. We are committed to product development and expanding the scale of our business. With our branches all over the Americas, Europe, and Asia, ECS localizes sales and retail in order to provide immediate and convenient service for our customers.
-Taipei, Taiwan
-Tokyo, Japan
-Seoul, Korea
-Wijchen, Netherlands
-Fremont, USA
-Moscow, Russia
-Sao Paulo, Brazil
Manufacturing Sites
ECS adopts a vertical integration structure of design, component manufacturing, and system assembly. At present, ECS has established two manufacturing locations; well-developed supply chain capabilities, and well-monitored production links; and the capacity to adapt to the needs of the ever-changing market.
-Golden Elite Technology (Shenzhen), China
-ESZ (Suzhou), China"
Windows Based OS
With the anticipation and excitement to have Windows-Based Mini PC, LIVA is proud to bring you the latest Windows 8.1 OS to ensure you a pleasant user experience.
Dual Graphics Displays
With HDMI and D-Sub support, LIVA provides not only two independent output displays, offering a wise choice of home entertainment or multi-display applications, but also wide coverage support of both digital and analog displays.
Power Saving
LIVA only uses about as much power as just a light bulb!
Equipped with Low Voltage DRAM and Intel Bay Trail-M SoC with Micro USB power supply design, which only takes 5V / 15W of total power consumption, LIVA brings great energy saving ability and the most efficient performance.
Mobility-Walking PC
Seriously, there is nothing comparable to the mobility of LIVA Mini PC Kit.
Based on low power consumption of Intel Bay Trail processor, LIVA can be booted up and operated simply by a power bank.
40-Second Set Up
With screw-free design of LIVA Mini PC Kit, users can easily self-assemble their own PC and finish all the processes within 40 seconds.
And more importantly, it’s so fun and easy!
Intel® Bay Trail-M SoC Processor
Featuring Intel® Bay Trail-M SoC (System-on-a-Chip) processor, based on the new low-power consumption microarchitecture “Silvermont” Providing the fan-less thermal design with better acoustic performance, LIVA is a great Mini PC with the advantages of high performance and power saving.
eMMC Storage Technology
eMMC, Embedded Multi-Media Card, comprised of both flash memory and a flash memory controller, which is often used for mobile devices. eMMC greatly reduces the response time and is suitable for high performance applications.
The ultra-thin eMMC allows LIVA Mini PC Kit to be palm-sized small.
M.2 Socket Wireless Communication
(WiFi 802.11b/g/n & Bluetooth 4.0 Combo Card)
The evolution of onboard interface M.2 socket provides a better and faster standard for connecting NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor), provides a better and faster standard for connection and expansion. LIVA adopts the latest M.2 Interface with the WiFi / Bluetooth Combo Card for Better wireless communication.
Low Voltage DRAM
LIVA Integrates low voltage Double Data Rate III Synchronous DRAM, usually used for Notebook PC solution, which is 8% power saving than regular DRAM, DDR3L is ideally suited for the main memory application, which requires large memory density, high bandwidth and low power operation.
In this article we will be able to look on one of the most interesting products released by ECS: the LIVA Mini-PC Kit. Why this is a kit? Well, because ECS leaves us to assemble the product ourselves so we would learn a bit about the components inside the little contraption. Time to move on with the packaging: the product is shipped inside a tiny cardboard box, with an exploded view of the item inside:
The technical specifications of the product are located on one of the sides; LIVA comes in two variants, on with 32GB of storage and the other with 64GB:
After lifting the top cover, ECS lets us discover the history of the product name:
Further on, we will get in contact with the installation disk and also the Quick Installation Guide:
The rest of the components are split in multiple compartments:
The LIVA Mini-PC case is split in two separate components, each inside its own plastic bag:
The two plastic parts are easy to assemble together since they do not require screws of any kind:
On the laterals but also top and bottom, ECS has placed ventilation grills
In the front we will find the placeholder for the Power button and LED:
In the back, ECS has provided cut-outs for the interfaces:
If we look more careful inside the casing, we will discover some dedicated places for other components which we will explore later on:
The bottom component of the case is provided with four plastic feet:
The heart of the mini-computer is wrapped inside a transparent anti-static bag:
LIVA motherboard (ECS BAT-MINI) is covered with a small heatsink and does not need any active cooling:
On its back side we will be able to spot the rest of the components, but let’s go a little bit more in-depth:
After the removal of the tiny heatsink, we will be able to uncover the main processor, eMMC storage chip, RAM, along with the audio CODEC:
Sandisk SDIN8DE4-64G eMMC assures 64GB of storage:
The ALC282 from REALTEK takes care of the audio interface:
In the center we have the Celeron N2807 dual-core processor:
Four Elpida J4216EFBG chips are present for a total of 2GB of RAM:
The CR2032 battery can be found on the back side of the motherboard:
The M.2 socket is also present here, where we will install the provided WiFi / Bluetooth Combo Card:
Let’s check out the rest of the accessories; besides the Combo Card, we will find two small antennas and the screw for fixing the card inside the slot:
The Combo Card was manufactured by AzureWave with the AW-NB136NF code name:
Its PCB houses two tiny antenna ports:
The card can be installed inside the slot in seconds:
After unpacking the antennas, we must manipulate them carefully in order not to de-solder the wires from the PCBs:
We will install the two pieces on the top of the LIVA case, as instructed:
Afterwards we will install the antennas to the card ports and attach the motherboard to its chassis:
Finally, we will attach the bottom cover in order to finalize the installation:
In the frontal part of the unit, we have the Power button and LED, along with a speaker jack:
In the back we have one USB power connector, one RJ45 port along with one USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0, one HDMI and one VGA:
Here are also some shots in the ventilated areas:
The supplied adapter will supply power to our mini-PC:
This one was manufactured by Asian Power Devices and is rated on the output as 5V at 3A:
For more in-depth information, ECS has issued a full User Guide:
The BIOS interface of this mini-PC is the area where people will not spend a lot of time in; we are dealing here with an Aptio Setup Utility which features a simple menu on the top side of the screen. The Main section allows us to modify the system language, but also the date and time:
Inside the Advanced section, we will find multiple sub-menus like LAN Configuration, Power Management Setup, ACPI Settings, CPU Configuration or USB Configuration:
The LAN Configuration menu will only allow changing the status of the controller:
Next, Power Management Setup menu allows different types of resumes, along with the EuP mode:
The next menu comes with the option to adjust the ACPI Sleep State
From the CPU Configuration menu, we will be able to adjust several CPU-related features:
The CPU Information section is supplied inside a sub-menu:
Inside the USB Configuration menu we will be able to enable or disable the interfaces, along with the XHCI mode:
The Chipset section comes with the SoC Configuration and TXE Information sub-menus:
SoC Configuration allows us to select the total memory which should be reserved for the internal GPU, but also enable or disable the HD Audio or HDMI audio:
Next, we will be able to enable or disable the Trusted Execution Engine:
The Tweak menu only lists some of the system details:
Inside the Boot menu, we will be able to select the boot devices; as we have seen with the other Bay Trail-M system from Shuttle, we are limited with the Boot Mode Select options so only UEFI is selected implicitly; also, Windows 7 boot is not possible at the moment, but we hope that a future BIOS update will fix this:
The usual Security tab allows us to set the admin password and also work with the Secure Boot Menu options:
Finally, we have the Exit menu where we can save, discard or load factory defaults:
The upgrade to 64GB of eMMC is a great benefit since we will be able to install more applications on the partition; we ended up having 41.5GB of free space after installing Windows 8.1 and performing the latest updates:
First hardware monitoring program we have fired up is CPU-Z, with its multiple information tabs:
CPU
Caches
Mainboard
Memory
GPU-Z will give us a summary on the integrated GPU:
We have also fired up the latest AIDA64 for finding out more details regarding the internal components:
CPU
Motherboard
CPU IMC
Integrated Graphics
A small test with ATTO Disk Benchmark was performed for finding out the read/write speeds:
The mini PC kit ECS has offered is shipped in a DIY format, which is quite unique for this market and by assembling it, people will learn a bit regarding its internal components. Customers should pay a little bit of attention when installing the WiFi/Bluetooth antennas along with the M.2 Combo Card in order not to damage it.
The sturdy plastic case protects the internal components against damages and the supplied interfaces are enough to start operating right away. We have ports for dual monitor support, two USBs, one RJ45 for wired LAN but also wireless connectivity via the internal card. The unit does not need active cooling and it can be powered by an USB power bank if another source of energy cannot be located nearby, which is great. Be warned though that the specific power source must be able to deliver at least 2.1 A, otherwise you will encounter issues.
The Bay Trail-M platform from Intel does not support Legacy boot, but only UEFI and we are limited at the moment to Windows 8.1 installs (with Linux support later on). The drivers we need to install are quite numerous but all are found on the ECS website. If we need updated versions, we can always go take a look on the Intel Drivers download website.
While the unit was offered first with only 32GB of storage, and the remaining space after the Windows installation was not that much, now this issue has been solved with the new 64GB eMMC version, with more than 41GB space left.
The small LIVA can perform office tasks without breaking a sweat and we highly recommend it. Negative points? Well, there is only one: the device is fitted with only two USB ports and if we would have at least three, it would have been better in order to be able to attach a storage device along with the keyboard and mouse.
The LIVA mini-PC is available online for about 156 Euros.
We would like to thank again to ECS for making this review possible!