Voyo V3 Review - A Fanless Intel Atom x7-Z8700 (Cherry Trail) mini-PC

Miscellaneous Aspects and Final Words

The Voyo V3 provided us with the opportunity to evaluate the capabilities of the Intel Atom x7-Z8700 in a wall-powered device. Thanks to the presence of a SATA controller (ASM1061) and a 128GB M.2 SSD as well as 4GB of RAM, the unit is actually able to provide a better experience compared to all the passively-cooled Braswell PCs that we have evaluated before. However, before talking more about the positives, let us recount all the issues we faced with the Voyo V3.

• The advertising of the product in online stores is very misleading - there is no 5G / dual-band Wi-Fi (only a Bluetooth 4.0 + 1x1 802.11n 2.4 GHz radio), HDMI 2.0 or USB 3.1 Type-C port. The Type-C port in the system is only for power delivery and not available for data transfer
• Voyo doesn't seem to have much experience in tuning BIOS options for stability. DTS / thermal protection was disabled in the default configuration
• The pre-installed WIndows 10 copy is a mess - UAC was disabled and the OS refused to activate. We will be charitable when saying that Voyo doesn't know how to ship licensed versions of Windows pre-installed on the PCs, but it is more likely that the shipped OS is bootlegged. Consumers buying this PC would do well to wipe out the SSD and re-install their own copy of Windows on the machine
• Voyo has nil support for users treating the PC as a barebones (sans OS) unit. There are no drivers available for download on their website, and we had to download the Windows install image from a Chinese filesharing website in order to get all the necessary drivers
• The thermal design, while being effective, is not as efficient as it could have been - the heat from the SoC is transferred to the underside of the unit (with very little clearance to the surface on which the unit is placed).

The drawbacks listed above are not showstoppers, but things that consumers need to keep in mind before purchasing the unit. Moving on to the positives:

• The fanless Voyo V3, with its top-end Cherry Trail-T SoC, 128 GB M.2 SATA SSD and 4GB of RAM, outperforms passively cooled Braswell-based mini-PCs in almost all benchmarks
• The M.2 SATA SSD is miles ahead of eMMC-based storage subsystems found in most other Cherry Trail PCs in this price range. The RAM capacity is also quite large for this price range.
• The industrial design of the unit, with its curved edges, metal chassis and glass top, is quite pleasing
• The unit is perfect for a secondary 1080p HTPC where HD audio bitstreaming is not a must - Kodi 16.0 works flawless with hardware video decoding for all major codecs

In terms of possible improvements, we would like Voyo to rethink the thermal solution in order to extract even more performance out of similar platforms. A better WLAN chipset is definitely needed, and I am sure consumers would be willing to pay even a $10 - $20 premium for the same. A LAN port would also be nice (though we understand that the issue has more to do with the absence of Ethernet on the Atom x7-Z8700 itself). The marketing department needs to advertise the unit with the correct specifications, and, obviously, the Windows OS issue needs to be resolved in a legal manner. It might even be better for Voyo to just ship the unit as a barebones system and make the drivers alone available for download on their website.

Based on our research, the pricing of the unit varies quite a lot. The supplier of our review unit, Gearbest, ships the system from China and has the product on sale between $208 and $215. If you are looking for a US-based seller, Amazon has got you covered for a hefty $360.

In summary, once we got past the initial setup issues and learned to ignore the misleading marketing points, it became difficult to not like the Voyo V3. The price of the unit, the system performance and the nature of some of the important components (such as the SSD and RAM) make it a very good value.