ECS Liva Q Pocket Size PC review - Introduction

ECS LIVA Q
A Super Small 7x7x3cm Formfactor Mini (HT)PC 

Small, smaller, smallest and then some. ECS now offers their new and tiny Liva Q. A low power PC that is so small that you can mount this fully fetched Windows 10 Ready PC behind your monitor, heck it will even fit in the palm of your hands. A PC that comes with a Gigabit Ethernet jack, AC WIFI and Bluetooth USB3, HDMI and a Micro SD slot for some more storage. ECS Liva Q is available with a choice of a dual-core or quad-core processor option, up to 4GB of RAM, and up to 64GB of eMMC storage.

The SoC empowering this unit is Intel's Apollo Lake, it has 4GB of LPDDR4 memory and even a 32 GB SSD. With power consumption at a maximum 8 Watts, this thing is just so much fun, you will be surprised to see what this product offers. The base model has a two-core, two-threaded Intel Celeron N3350 SoC, 2 GB of LPDDR4 memory, and 32 GB of eMMC storage. A premium model can be fitted with Intel Pentium N4200 with four cores and threads, 4 GB of memory, and 64 GB of integrated storage. The end-users who might be interested in a product like this need to be found in the SOHO, Net PC or HTPC space. The ECS LIVA Q with its incredibly small size will fit anywhere, and pre-installed with Windows 10 is it fast enough for normal web-browsing, office applications like Word and Excell but sure, even some simplistic work with Photoshop would not be a problem. Weight? Get this, 9.2 oz (260 g). The ECS LIVA Q does not have a very fast processor, it does offer just about enough performance for everyday PC usage. Next, to that, you can easily hide this unit behind your monitor, or HDTV. With that in mind, this easily can be a product that accelerates and post processes high definition movies and music, preferably the content is streamed over a network. And that's where we land at net-tops and mini-tops.

  
As an HTPC it is wise to that this unit is HDMI 2.0 capable. Apollo Lake SoCs have no issue decoding 4K h.264/265 content. In its bare essence, this is pretty much a tiny PC that is armed with a 2-core processor (the 14nm Celeron N3350) clocked at a base clock 1.1 GHz that may burst/boost towards 2.40 GHz. The embedded GPU that houses inside the processor is fast enough to decode and accelerate 1080P video content perfectly, heck I'll up it a notch as it even is capable of 3840x2160 video playback at 60 Hz. It comes with connectivity like HDMI but not  DisplayPort. It has one Gigabit Ethernet jack and fully fetched AC WiFi as well. LIVA Q has one USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A and one USB 2.0 Type-A port and also a microSD slot that can accept cards as large as 128 GB. We'll test the dual-core version, armed with 4GB memory and 32 GB storage.