ECS LIVA X Review: A Fanless Bay Trail-M mini-PC
by Ganesh T S on January 16, 2015 11:30 AM ESTPower Consumption and Thermal Performance
The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 1080p display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the ECS LIVA X with other passively cooled PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran Furmark 1.12.0 and Prime95 v27.9 together. The numbers are not beyond the realm of reason for the combination of hardware components in the machine.
Load power consumptionis slightly higher in the LIVA X, but that is to be expected with the bump in the clock speeds compared to the original LIVA. The LIVA and the LIVA X turn out to be amongst the most power efficient passively cooled PCs that we have evaluated
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 clocks in the system as well as the temperatures within the unit are presented below.
One thing to note is that the cores are configured to run at the turbo speed (2.25 GHz) when the system is stressed. Unfortunately, half-way through our CPU + GPU load test, the system started throttling, with the CPU clocks going as low as 1.1 GHz (from 2.25 GHz) and the GPU clocks going as low as 200 MHz (from the 760 MHz loaded state). The drops in the frequency can be directly correlated with the core temperature graphed below at the same time. Even though the CPU doesn't reach the maximum junction temperature of 100 C, ECS has opted for precautionary throttling at 96 C itself.
The throttling was very surprising because ECS has opted for a very thick thermal heat sink (evident in the increased weight of the system) which should potentially perform much better compared to what was in the ECS LIVA. It turned out that the media samples we received had the thermal pads in the wrong place. Customer shipments will shift them a bit to resolve the overheating issue.
Another important aspect to keep note of while evaluating fanless PCs is the chassis temperature. Using Seek Thermal's thermal imager, we observed the chassis temperature after the CPU package temperature reached the steady state value (and immediately after thermal throttling started) in the above graph.
Even though the internal core temperature was close to 100 C, the chassis itself never got too hot to touch. As our thermal imager showed, the maximum external temperature was only 59 C.
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Oxford Guy - Wednesday, January 21, 2015 - link
I'm not saying the test isn't interesting, but it's not particularly practical in this case. The only thing it does is let people know that if they want to run Furmark and Prime together they need to introduce some active cooling or a low ambient temperature. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with knowing that. However, it's not very high on the list of practical information.Oxford Guy - Monday, January 19, 2015 - link
"32 GB is not enough once a couple of Windows updates get installed."False. I have a 32 GB model and it has around 6 or 7 GB of free space with a fully updated Windows 8.1
random2 - Tuesday, January 20, 2015 - link
"...(UCFF) have emerged as one of the bright spots in the troubled PC market."Someone needs to do a study on the sales volumes seen in the PC component industry. There are a lot of people building these days rather than buying pre-made units from manufacturers like Cyberpower, Dell and others.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, January 20, 2015 - link
Thanks for posting idle and load power consumption numbers and addressing some reader concerns about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of delta charts where wattage is concerned.djfourmoney - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
I like these tiny PC's. I was interested in the first Liva but it's shortcomings I knew would be addressed if I waited.As for case use -
Small HTPC. I have a Llano HTPC currently with a great ANTEC case with six drive slots not to mention the I can put two SSD's in it's 2.5 slot (no floppy) and replace the 5.25 slots with hot swap cages.
In other words it would make a very nice, fairly low draw server that can easily trans-code, among other things.
There was a time when I thought I would use the HTPC for more PC games, which is why I got the Llano but as time goes on, I use it more for console emulation when I do play games and I have PS2 and PS3.
Plus I can mount something like this on the back of a LCD and run everything else off a power USB 3.0 hub.
That said my Cable CARD tuner has to be hard reset every so often because it drops both tuners, I guess I could go with a network tuner but then I would need another cable run to where the router is.
Anyway, beyond that downgrading my HTPC seems to make sense to me. My original target was the Gigabyte Brix but only two AMD sku's are offered and the least expensive model might be discontinued and is hard to find.
m-ITX is an option but cost is off-putting.
Just thinking out loud I suppose.