ECS LIVA Review: The Nettop Rises Again
by Ganesh T S on July 18, 2014 9:15 AM ESTPower Consumption and Thermal Performance
The power consumption at the wall was measured with the display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the ECS LIVA with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran Furmark 1.12.0 and Prime95 v27.9 together.
In order to evaluate thermal performance, we first ran our test for load power consumption and made sure that the unit wasn't getting throttled. In order to determine the efficiency of the cooling system, we first loaded up the CPU alone using just Prime 95 for around 30 minutes. This was followed by addition of the GPU load (FurMark) for another 30 minutes, and then removal of the CPU load for 10 minutes. The system was then left idle. The various frequencies and temperatures during this loading process are recorded in the graphs below.
The above graphs show that ECS has designed a 25% overclock into the Celeron N2806, operating it at 2.00 GHz throughout our CPU loading test (with and without the GPU loading). The GPU is also able to sustain the maximum dynamic frequency of 750 MHz+ without thermal issues. At idle, the cores drop down close to 500 MHz and the GPU drops down to around 350 MHz. On the temperature side, we see the temperature stabilizing at slightly less than 100 C. With a junction temperature of 105 C, I believe consumers don't need to worry about thermal throttling at usual room temperatures (~78 F was the ambient when we tested) irrespective of the load on the unit.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
55 Comments
View All Comments
nathanddrews - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
I'm guessing that if my Pentium T4400 laptop can do it, then this thing can as well, but that would be a great test now that Streaming is out of beta.rocktober13 - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
I was looking for something like this too. I ended up going with an Amazon Fire TV, and sideloaded limelight. It seems to be able to handle 1080p streaming, but I haven't tested it extensively. I just got it up and running. I would say it's a pretty nice solution at only $100. It does require an Nvidia card though. Oh, and you can side load XBMC for a complete HTPC replacement.djfourmoney - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
Fire TV is the best set-top media streamer available ATM. For what I do with a HTPC, I had considered switching to a DirecTV HD-DVR (Tivo maybe) and a FireTV for all the streaming stuff.The FireTV can handle YouTube, but no support for Hulu Free, just Hulu Plus (boo!). Guess I could watch Hulu free via XMBC like you said side-loaded onto it.
I'm just not fond of switching inputs. But I do it manually not by remote, so maybe if I solved that issue, it would just leave Hulu.
I could then retire the P4 WHS 2011 and use the use the Llano as the server use less power and the case can hold four drives, adding 6TB would solve all my storage issues at once, in-fact just adding one more 3TB drive will do that.
We'll see... But I like the Liva for maybe a micro server? With Windows Server unfortunately you would have to put it on a larger drive first and then shrink it down.
owan - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
Can the slot occupied by the wifi module be repurposed for an SSD if the storage is insufficient? Obviously you lose wifi, but a USB based wifi would be an easy fix.ganeshts - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
No, I had the same question for ECS initially, but the answer is that the M.2 slot can be used only for the appropriate Wi-Fi cardsSamus - Saturday, July 19, 2014 - link
That's so stupid. Is there a BIOS blacklist or something?speculatrix - Saturday, July 19, 2014 - link
I think it's just that miniPCIe can be wired in different ways, for usb, sata and pcie-like, so quite possibly this board simply isn't wired for mSATA?Aikouka - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
When I saw that the unit had a M.2 slot, I had hopes that it could be replaced with a M.2-based SSD. Unfortunately, based on some Google searching, that Wi-Fi/BT card is a 1630 M.2 card ( http://www.embeddedworks.net/wlan515.html ), which means it's 30mm long. The smallest M.2 SSD that I can find is a xx42, which is 42mm long. =( 32GB would be really pushing it for PLEX, which stores its metadata (images) locally. Although, I think you can change settings to reduce it, but my HTPCs definitely use more than 32GB of their SSDs.ganeshts - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
Two ideas here:1. Add a USB thumb drive 'permanently'
2. If you have a NAS, create a iSCSI LUN and map it on this PC.
mcfrumpy - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
I just want something cheap I can run a Ventrilo server on. I'm assuming this will work great.