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.
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djfourmoney - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
Tell the truth. Even video editing is marginal in Linux. Many people don't have the disk space, don't know what a NAS is, routers with NAS capability are towards the high end of the consumer market so no BluRay playback, you would have to rip the disk with the proper software and then store the file someplace.Of course you could use the usenet, but no further details from me and most people barely understand torrents, never mind usenet...
The reason why the iPhone is popular because it's dead simple to use, hardware is barely touted and it's all about the apps and accessories. Just when you think hardware makers would standardize the location of the mini USB port on Android phones, a whole slew of cheap devices throw cold water on that.
Chromebooks works because Google Chrome works as a browser with apps.... Considering how much I use Chrome, I am going to use this laptop I am typing on (quad core AMD) for desktop replacement, Sony Vegas supports AMD hardware for faster encoding, so does Studio 17.
Just remove the hybrid drive and replace it with a 1TB SSD as prices continue to drop, use a USB 3.0 512GB External SSD for archiving footage/mobile storage. Currently 8GB Dual Channel @1600Hz, I could upgrade to 16GB @1600 as well.
Once that happens, one of the larger Chromebooks would be perfect for internet browsing, streaming,etc.
Though I need a laptop or Surface/Ultrabook type device for DJ'ing.
Still like the Liva as a x86 Pi killer.
Soul_Est - Monday, July 28, 2014 - link
If you really tried to learn and use Cinelerra (Pro level), Blender, OpenShot, Pitivi, or Avidemux, then you cannot say that video editing under Linux is 'marginal'.davolfman - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
Could you test Steam in home streaming at least wired with little systems like these? I think that's an increasingly less rare use case.dylan522p - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
It works really well. I run it on a quadcore baytrail system with teh same iGPU, but it only sees about 25% usage so you should be finewireframed - Saturday, July 19, 2014 - link
At least in theory, anything that can decode h.264 at whatever resolution you want to display should work fine for In-Home streaming. The client PC isn't really doing anything but sending controller input and decoding the resulting video stream. There's probably a tiny bit of overhead from the Steam API but it should be neglible.abufrejoval - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
This should be a pretty nice Android box and a more flexible alternative to Hardkernel Odroids, especially with the 64-bit L(ollipop?) release.I've so far been using Minit-ITX variant with the J1900 Bay-Trail, which are quite a bit bigger and I've been yearning for something which has everything soldered on so it can be made smaller.
Those are pretty good already in terms of (Android!) game performance and certainly good enough for surfing, Android Office or as a thin client (RDP/Citrix/Splashtop) to some big iron.
For Android the 32GB eMMC are really none too bad and for anything beyond there is always USB 3 and network.
But I'd also want 4GB or even 8GB perhaps as optional configs, because the cost difference is so small it shouldn't matter and one might actually run a full Linux on there, just for the fun of it.
With regards to the power usage, I found no measurable difference on the J1900 between 4GB and 8GB (one or two modules) of DRAM, so that shouldn't matter.
Dunno if eMMC 4.4 is a platform limitation of BayTrail or just what they put there, but eMMC 5.0 would give much better performance with diminishing price premiums.
Even with 4GB DRAM it should stay below $149 to sell like hotcakes.
TerdFerguson - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
If the device is primarily intended to be a set-top HTPC device, why doesn't it come with a built-in programmable IR receiver and blaster?Blassster - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
Would this be too underpowered to run POE ipcam software thats stores the video to a NAS or external drive and also allow Internet streaming of a select camera? Let's say 4 1080p cameras (or even 720p).tipoo - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
I'm more interested in the $250 Gigabyte Brix with the AMD APU in it, seems like a fair bit of GPU and CPU bang for your buck for that price.JadedMan - Saturday, July 19, 2014 - link
Any idea if this machine play a typical 3D Bluray properly?