At first we would like to thank ECS for sending out a sample of their LIVA Z Mini-PC for testing and reviewing.

 

 

 

About ECS:

 

“Founded in 1987, ECS, the Elitegroup Computer Systems, is a top-notch manufacturer and supplier of several families of computer products in the industry. With almost 30 years of experience, ECS not only produces high-quality products such as motherboards, desktops, notebook computers, graphics cards and other mobile products, but also provides customized computer programming and hardware/ software design service for a wide variety of customers.

More than two decades, ECS has overcome a great deal of obstacles encountering new businesses and has experienced the joy of significant growth and development. 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.”

 

Product Features:

 

Elegant design

 

LIVA Z Mini PC defies convention and redefines the look of a desktop PC. Simple and elegant, its finish fits right in your living or workspace.

 

Palm-Size PC

 

Smaller than a lunchbox and less volume than a large soda can, LIVA Z Mini PC is the smallest mini PC in its kind, with a case that still provides all the elements of a desktop-worthy PC.

 

Fanless & Power Saving

 

Using just 1/10th power of regular desktop PC while delivering similar performance with fanless design, quiet and cooling, matching home entertainment.

 

Speed of 802.11 ac Wi-Fi

 

LIVA Z Mini PC delivers Wi-Fi speeds that equal or surpass cabled networks to provide the highest network speeds for content delivery, video streaming and productivity.

 

Ultra-realistic 4K visuals experience

 

Featuring Intel HD 500 series integrated graphic, it supports revised video engine now decodes HEVC 10-bit, playing 4K video smoothly and gives you ultra-realistic visuals with breathtaking levels of detail.

 

Product Specifications:

 

 

 

We have not got in contact with a product from ECS for quite some time, but this has changed just recently when we had the chance to try out their LIVA Z Mini-PC, sporting an Apollo Lake Intel Celeron N3350 SoC. Apollo Lake takes part of the budget Intel Series (Atom line), comes right after Braswell and aims for very low power consumption in order to be integrated in entry-level netbooks or notebooks. To be more exact, it is built on the 14nm process technology as Braswell but sports Goldmont CPU cores, an updated Gen9 (HD 500) iGPU and adds some updates regarding the supported video codecs.

 

The product is shipped inside a themed cardboard enclosure and on the top cover we will get to see some logos of the supported technologies:

 

 

 

Some technical details can be spotted on the side of the packaging:

 

 

 

After removing the top layer, we will end up with an all-black cardboard enclosure:

 

 

 

Next, we have lifted the box cover:

 

 

 

Besides the actual Mini-PC, we will also receive the power brick, a VESA mount, the power lead but also the necessary screws for mounting the VESA:

 

 

 

The VESA mount does also come with guides so we will mount it correctly in the back of our display:

 

 

 

 

The power adapter is manufactured by FSP Group Inc. and comes rated on the output as 19V at 3.42A:

 

 

 

 

 

The top cover of the LIVA Z mini-PC wants to resemble a vinyl record design, with the LIVA logo in the right corner; regarding the product size, it really reminds us of those Android Mini-PCs which are meant to be used as media centers while having them plugged to a FHD or 4K TV:

 

 

 

In the frontal area of the device, we will get to see the Power button that is surrounded by a white LED ring, three USB 3.0 ports but also one USB 3.0 Type-C port; nearby we can also spot one audio combo jack:

 

 

 

The right side does feature a ventilation grill, same as left:

 

 

 

 

In the back, the manufacturer has included a mDP port, one HDMI 1.4 port, two Gigabit LAN interfaces but also the DC-IN port:

 

 

 

The bottom area of the unit does feature a circular rubber layer and in the middle the manufacturer has placed stickers with the manufacturing date, power rating but also the product serial number. For maintenance, we can always remove the four screws in the corners:

 

 

 

After we have removed the bottom cover, we can check out the internals; in order to upgrade the system, it is not necessary to fully remove the motherboard from the case since all slots are present on the most accessible side:

 

 

 

Just for kicks and to show you guys what resides underneath, we have also removed the motherboard from the case; this also meant that we had to remove the wireless/Bluetooth antennas, along with the screws which kept the cooling system in place:

 

 

 

LIVA Z does come with a fully passive cooling system and does not really need more since the Celeron 3350 SoC does dissipate very little heat! The large aluminum sink is accompanied by a middle copper plate, which gets in direct contact with the SoC:

 

 

 

On the top area of the sink we will spot the special design which allows passive cooling to occur:

 

 

 

The top area of the housing can be inspected more easily with the cooling system removed; we do have available two wireless antennas with the respective cables, but also a third cable which supplies power to the board:

 

 

 

The top layer of the PCB does house the Celeron SoC in the middle:

 

 

 

 

Near the CPU, we will be able to spot the RT5073B Power Management IC:

 

 

 

Between the two Single-Port Transformer modules, we will get to see a Realtek RT8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller:

 

 

 

Coming back to the bottom PCB area, we will spot the Intel Dual-Band Wireless-AC 3165 adapter:

 

 

 

In its vicinity, we have the CMOS battery available:

 

 

 

These Mini-PCs come equipped with either 32GB or 64GB of e.MMC; in our case it is the 32GB version, which is represented by a SanDisk SDINADF4-32G IC which does support e.MMC 5.1 standard:

 

 

 

On the top of the Intel card we can also install a 42mm M.2 SSD:

 

 

 

We can install up to 8GB of DDR3L SODIMM RAM on this motherboard, thanks to the two memory slots:

 

 

 

Our sample has arrived with a Kingston CBD16D3LS1KBG/4G memory module preinstalled:

 

 

 

In the backside of the memory slots, we could spot some additional headers:

 

 

 

The ECS Liva Z Mini-PC is equipped with a plain-looking Aptio Setup utility, which has the well-known layout. Inside the Main menu, we can adjust the system language, date but also the system time:

 

 

 

The Advanced area comes with the following sub-menus:

 

LAN Configuration

Power Management Setup

PC Health Status

eMMC Configuration

SATA Configuration

Wireless Function Configuration

ACPI Settings

CPU Configuration

USB Configuration

Trusted Computing

 

 

 

The LAN Configuration area does allow the user to enable or disable the on-board LAN interfaces:

 

 

 

Moving on to the Power Management Setup menu, we can work with some of the usual PM options:

 

 

 

PC Health Status menu does show the current SoC temperature:

 

 

 

eMMC Configuration menu allows the user to enable or disable the embedded Sandisk eMMC memory IC:

 

 

 

Next, we do have the ability to choose the operating mode for the SATA interface:

 

 

The Wireless Function Configuration menu does allow the user to turn on/off the Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi functions:

 

 

The ACPI Sleep mode can be adjusted in the next section:

 

 

The CPU Configuration menu allows us to access some additional CPU Information, does show the rated CPU speed, but also from here we can modify some CPU-related features:

 

 

The USB Configuration menu allow the user to disable the USB interface or enable Legacy USB Support:

 

 

 

Security devices are also supported in the next menu area:

 

 

 

The Chipset menu houses two different sub-sections:

 

Platform Firmware

SoC Configuration

 

 

 

The Platform Firmware versions are listed in the respective menu:

 

 

 

SoC Configuration area does allow the user to adjust the memory quantity reserved for the iGPU, but also enable or disable the onboard audio interface:

 

 

 

M.I.B III section is usually present on ECS products that support overclocking, but this is not the case and we only get a simple system information list:

 

 

 

The Boot menu allows us to select the boot mode depending on the supported operating systems, but also the boot devices priority:

 

 

 

The Security menu does come with the ability to specify an admin password but also work with the Secure Boot options:

 

 

Lastly, we do have the Exit menu that allows the user to save, discard or load factory defaults:

 

 

First hardware monitoring program we have fired up is CPU-Z, with its multiple information tabs:

 

CPU

 

 

Caches

 

 

Mainboard

 

 

Memory

 

 

SPD

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

We have also tested the performance of the Sandisk eMMC 32GB present on the board -> the overall performance is decent, but there was simply not enough space on the partition after Windows 10 was installed along with all updates in order to run our test programs:

 

 

The solution to the problem became quite clear: the installation of the Transcent M.2 TS128GMTS400 SSD (thanks to Shuttle) on the system and also served for direct comparison with the Shuttle NC02U barebone we have tested some time ago:

 

 

AIDA64

 

Cinebench R15

 

 

 

Blender Ryzen Render

 

 

PCMark 7

 

 

PCMark 8

 

 

SuperPI XS [2M]

 

X265 Benchmark 1080P 64-bit Normal

 

GeekBench 4

 

 

3DMark Vantage

 

 

3DMark 2013

 

 

Tomb Raider

Andrenaline Action Benchmark Presets

 

Hitman: Absolution

Andrenaline Action Benchmark Presets

 

Sleeping Dogs

Andrenaline Action Benchmark Presets

After finalizing the first Z270 motherboard review which did imply a move to the Windows 10 operating system, we did the same thing now with the AIO systems testing (barebone or fully equipped) because Intel is removing support for Windows 7 and 8/8.1 operating systems on the newest hardware. This does include the latest Kaby Lake processors, but also the Apollo Lake SoC we have had featured in this article. The LIVA Z Mini-PC from ECS is shipped in multiple hardware configurations when referring to the processor (with Apollo Lake Celeron N3350 SoC (as our sample), the Celeron N3450 SoC or the Pentium N4200 SoC) but also regarding the onboard eMMC, which can be 32GB or 64GB. Those which go with the 32GB version, please keep in mind that only very little space will remain available for applications after we do install Windows 10, the respective drivers and even perform a cleanup after all Windows updates have been installed too; in this case, the best solution is to go with a separate M.2 SSD, with a larger capacity of our choice.

 

The Celeron N3350 SoC consumes very little power (has a SDP of 4W), supports memory up to 8GB and features a boost up to 2.4GHz (from its base frequency of 1.1GHz). Even if the running frequency is considerably higher than the Celeron 3855U we have found inside the NC02U from Shuttle, the performance is lower so we are recommending it for simple tasks such as office work, digital signage or light Internet browsing. A great addition versus the previous generation is the updated iGPU which now supports hardware acceleration for 4K video encoding/decoding with H.265 and VP9 which allows watching high-definition video content without stuttering; one downside at 4K resolutions is that the HDMI 1.4 port can only drive at 30Hz which could be enough for movies but is non-optimal for other desktop activities. To be more exact we have recorded 4.66W with the device in IDLE, and only 8.48W in Full-Load so practically you can leave this Mini-PC on 24/7 and forget about it….ideal torrent box anyone? :)

 

No matter the system load, even if we are dealing with a passive cooled system, you do not need to worry! After 40 minutes of AIDA64 stress testing, the CPU cores only reached a maximum of 60 degrees Celsius, which is excellent!

 

 

 

We do not have any pricing details from the manufacturer, but we will surely update as soon as we do!

Edit: the manufacturer has just confirmed that the prices of the Liva Z Mini-PC are in a range of 199~250 USD, depending on the version.

ECS Liva Z Mini-PC is Recommended for:

 

 

We would like to thank again to ECS for making this review possible!