Review: ECS Liva Q

ECS is a well-known Taiwanese company that specializes in all sorts of mini PCs, components, and so on.The latest to come out their stable is the Live Q mini PC. And when they say mini PC, they literally mean it. It fits in the palm of your hand is a cute little cube.

In terms of look and feel, the ECS Liva Q has a very refined design. The overall build quality is really good and so is the finishing. The LIVA Q is one of the smallest mini-PCs around, measuring at only 70-by-70-by-31.4mm in size and weighing in at just 260-gms.

The LIVA Q is powered by an Intel Apollo Lake SOC processor – an Intel dual-core Celeron N3350, to be specific. It also comes with 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of eMMC storage. The Live Q comes with Windows 10 OS pre-installed.

When it comes to connectivity, the Liva Q offers a plethora of ports. On the front, you will find a USB 3.0 and a USB 2.0 port, while at the back you will find a full-size HDMI port, an RJ45 LAN port, and the micro USB power port.

On the left edge, you get a micro SD slot that supports cards with up to 128GB of storage capacity and on the right edge you get a Kensington lock slot. For wireless connectivity, you also get an 802.11ac Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 4.1 wireless module.

In order to test the performance of the Liva Q, we ran a couple of benchmarks such as Cinebench R15, PCMark 8 Home and PCMark 10. We were able to look into both the single- and mutli-core performances. We also tested our general computing performance through various tests that cover web browsing, writing, photo editing, video chat and playback, and casual gaming.

We were quite satisfied with the overall performance of the ECS Liva Q. It can work really well as an ultra compact HTPC. We did not run across any issues when streaming Herotalkies or StarzPlay. In addition, we were able to playback 4K content, too.

The Liva Q is also a good home PC, especially for your kids to do their homework and for you to do your day to day computing. The ECS Liva Q can handle all sorts of tasks such as word processing, web surfing, light gaming, image editing and so on. A must buy if you are on the market for a tiny PC!

Price: $186 (AED 685 approx.)