Economical small PCs: ECS relies on old Apollo Lake SoCs for the Liva Q1D / L

ECS Liva Q1D/L

The minimalistically designed PC Liva Q1D/L only needs an area of almost 55 cm² on the workplace or can be attached with a VESA holder behind a television or monitor at a weight of only 174 grams. It is based on Intel SoCs of the older generation Apollo Lake.

Smallest PCs below Liva-Z series

As a particularly space-saving and energy-efficient PC system, ECS already has the Liva family of mini PCs in its portfolio for some time. In the larger Liva Z line, even with comparatively high performance, as the latest offshoots use Liva Z3 Plus and Liva Z3E Plus - such as Zotac’s ZBoxes - Intel core processors.

Low space requirement with low power

The Liva-Q series, which comes with edge lengths of 74 74 mm and with a height of just under 34 mm, is also very flat, requires even less footprint. The small PCs Liva Q1D and Liva Q1L are less powerful due to the smaller space available and should be used primarily in less demanding office environments and educational facilities as well as in the "smart" home living room.

On a small board, either a Pentium N4200 with four cores or a Celeron N3350 with two cores from Intel’s almost four-year-old CPU generation Apollo Lake are soldered, which are flanked by two or four gigabytes of LPDDR4 RAM. This is also soldered and can not be expanded.As mass storage an eMMC memory chip with either 32 or 64 GB is offered. This can be expanded by a microSD card slot by a maximum of 128 GB.

Alternatively two LAN or additional DisplayPort

Liva Q1D and Liva Q1L are distinguished by the interfaces alone, because while the D model with DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 2.0 offers two outputs for video signals, the L-offshoot alone has HDMI. A second RJ45 port takes up the space at the rear terminal, whereby the Liva Q1L has a radio module (WLAN 802.11ac) as well as two gigabit LAN.

Apollo Lake SoCs for the Liva Q1D / L

For external peripherals, three USB ports are provided on the front and rear side via type A connectors. Two are specified according to standard USB 3.1 Gen1 (5 Gbit/s) and one according to USB 2.0. Bluetooth 4.1 is also part of the equipment via the installed WLAN card.

Without operating system for around 200 Euros to expect

The small PCs Liva Q1D and Liva Q1L offered in two colour variants are to be available without a pre-installed operating system according to the manufacturer from now on at prices starting from 190 US dollars. Regardless of the equipment, the faster Pentium models cost from $215. The small PC Liva Q2, also offered by ECS, promises more performance with similar dimensions, which uses a successor generation SoC Gemini Lake instead of Apollo Lake and as an alternative with Celeron N4000, 4 GB RAM and 64 GB eMMCMemory currently on Amazon from 185 Euro costs.