:) I do know that, but, then, the FLIR logo as well as the temperature reading are going to be upside down. Wanted to give importance to the temperature reading in particular, and so, the upside down picture remains.
True, but you have to look really hard to find a monitor that only has analog VGA and doesn't have at least a DVI connector (and you can convert from HDMI to DVI). Maybe if they left D-Sub out and shaved a few bucks off the price that would have been a better choice.
A lot of these type of computers are being used not for new installations; but to replace older ones in existing installs where they need to plug into the existing (typically VGA) setup. The displays (especially customer facing ones) in a lot of point of sale setups are physically integrated into the rest of the checkout/conveyer belt/etc setup and much harder and more expensive to replace than just getting a $100 bottom end display from your local computer boxmart.
Still feel like they should throw in DVI with a DVI to VGA cable, unless there's a driving reason to stick with VGA beyond connecting to older equipment.
You also have to look really hard at those monitors you're talking about if they actually come with a DVI cable. They usually only come with VGA included.
Not true, why does AsRock Beebox then have DP, HDMI ports even though it has very good and low price? Are you trying to tell tha monitors with a low price have only VGA ports? You are wrong.
"Even though this is a power virus test, the chassis temperatures reach an uncomfortable 75 C. ECS has taken the unenviable task of providing passive cooling for a 6W TDP SoC in a plastic chassis, and the problems are evident. It is likely that a chassis design similar to that of the Zotac C-series nano units (with perforations all around) could help with this aspect."
Maybe. I found the Zotac CI320 to have a 60+ min thermal tail with steady state idle temp of 50C. Perhaps a solution with both the perforated case of the Zotac and the better heatsink of the Liva would cut it. I think 6W TDP is the limit of what you can put in a plastic case. Beyond this, you need a metal case plate or a fan.
Recently sold some MSI Cubi systems to clients, really nice. All use Haswell SoC's, commonly available are dual-core 1.5Ghz Celeron, 1.9Ghz Pentium, and 2.0Ghz Core i3 with Hyper-threading. They do have fans, but are VERY quiet.
Having looked into both Bay Trail as well as Braswell recently when I wanted a passively cooled mini PC, I came away pretty disappointed with Braswell.
The unfortunate truth is, that despite the Braswell N3050/3150 being a 14nm part, and the Bay Trail J1800/1900 a 22nm part, in most use cases the Bay Trail is faster than the Braswell.
Most users would be better off getting the older Bay Trail system with the dual core J1800 CPU or the quadcore J1900. Why?
First of all Intel cut down power usage TOO MUCH. So much that it impacts performance. The Bay Trail parts have a 10W TDP, and manage to be cooled passively just fine. The Braswell parts have 4/6W TDP, and if you want to know where Intel found the additional Watts, look at the base clock.
The Braswell parts turboclock to just over 2GHZ, but the rest of the time they skip along at a pretty slow 1.6 GHZ.
The Bay Trail quadcore part on the other hand has a base clock of 2 GHZ but turbos up to 2.4, whereas the dualcore J1800 has a base clock of 2.4 GHZ, and turbos up to 2.6 GHZ.
That's why the Bay Trail parts are faster at most tasks then the newer Braswell. If you look at some of the reviews you'll see how they handily beat them in most benchmarks...
i cant see the point of any of these low power soc no matter what purpose , if it doesn't have avx/2 ( and none of these do) and at least quad cores its no better than the other 2006 sse4 simd available since Penryn then its already obsolete , IMO not even really good enough for the bargain basement generic £20 wifi router in 2015
Don't see the point? It's 2015 man! Intel has squeezed so much performance out of X86 that these their cheapest CPUs are fast enough for most people.
They're fine for everyday computing tasks, as long as your needs are just basic web surfing, YouTube/movie playing and light Office work.
My dad uses one for the above. Yeah, he could have gotten something with an i3 or i5 but he wanted something quiet, and for most tasks the speed difference is barely noticeable.
They also have plenty of horsepower (and Intel quicksync video) to be a nifty and silent media center. And really cheap too. You can get one an embedded CPU, mini Itx motherboard and 4gb ram, for less or right around a hundred dollars.
see below for the many of the 5v/2A arm boxes that have real HDMI2 at 60fps HW/SW playback of UHD1 content.... as long as intel do not provide the 2015 options (avx2 ,HDMI2/UHD1/60P etc instead of 2006 simd etc) on these low power SOC they will never pass the profitable ARM quad/octacore UHD compliant boxes we can buy right now....
Hi BMN! Not everyone out there is concerned with video playback for a system like this. As a small/cheap/quiet word processor and e-mail fetcher, platforms like the Liva x2 are perfectly suitable. Also, many people don't really worry much over specific decoding capabilities. As long as their new little computer can stream YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu, there's nothing to worry about and digging into the specifics isn't important or relevant.
I have a baytrail 3735D (quad core), which benchmarks about the same as the Braswell N3050, and while it seems fast enough most of the time, there are way to many instances where it skips and lags. Maybe it has to do with the eMMC storage, the overall experience isn't great. It's fine for a little while, but open up a few web pages, and things suddenly slow way down (with 2GB of RAM).
I just built a ASROCK N3150 B based HTPC and am quite impressed with the performance. The quad core chip comes for the same price as the N3050 and is quite impressive at I think it was like 6 watts of power. First time using a fanless CPU it feels awesome and weird when you turn on the system. You don't really feel its turned on! Perfect for watching all kinds of movies!
you are far better off buying any Amlogic S812 or related HTPC box with http://www.cnx-software.com/ that comes with HDMI2 at 60fps HW/SW playback NEON 128-bit SIMD (and encode if its activated) as a generic option than even the very latest Atom x5 x5-Z8300 that yet again removes AVX/2 SIMD and is by all accounts not even as good as the antiquated Atom-Z3735F Q1'14 http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Atom-x5-x5-Z8300-vs-...
"Instruction set extensions SSE2 SSE4 SSE3 EM64T SSE SSE4.1 SSE4.2 Supplemental SSE3 AES Supports dynamic frequency scaling N
BMNify, I'm not aware of any Amlogic S812 box with HDMI 2.0, can you give an example? CPU wise, Braswell is more powerful than Amlogic S812, for example a N3150 can decode H264 Hi10p. It's a pitty that Anandtech doesn't test the Braswell boxes with the latest OpenELEC beta versions...
see http://kodi.wiki/view/Android_hardware for list to start with several Rockchip ,Amlogic, and x1 devices are capable, you need to review them and choose your requirements
I have the original LIVA, which has a N2807, and costs about the same as this new one. I love it!
The only reason to "upgrade" would be for the better GPU and slightly better wifi. The CPUs, in fact, are equal in ability: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2263&cmp[]=2541
But actually, the X2 seems like a worse machine. It's bigger and sips more power. If you're interested in this box, consider getting the original model if you can find it!
For so many years Anandtech's HTPC reviews have been spreading misconceptions about the 23.976Hz refresh rate. As an avid reader, I used to think getting the perfect 23.976Hz refresh rate is all you need and have spent countless hours trying to do that with the various HTPCs I've owned over the years.
As you used madVR to test HTPC "credentials", it unfortunately lacks an important metric in its debug OSD -- the actual frame rate the video is being played back. This takes the reference clock into account - so even if the display refresh rate says 23.976Hz (which in this case isn't even close - it's only 23.974Hz), you still have to multiply that by refclk (-ve makes it even lower). As you could see in your own screenshot, you still get a frame drop every half an hour. The unfortunate thing about this is, every ECS LIVA x2 box is going to have a slightly different rate.
And let's not forget that not all sources are 23.976fps - some are true 24p video, others are 60p etc. Some monitors still don't report 60Hz in its EDID!
To get true frame drop-/repeat-free playback, your media player needs to have the ability to do something like Reclock. Most of you probably haven't noticed but the DirectSound Audio Renderer (or any non-exclusive audio renderers) already resamples your audio before it goes out to your audio card (the only case where it doesn't resample is when your audio stream is the exact match of your Windows global audio settings and nothing else is playing audio). As such, asking the audio renderer to resample the audio a bit to make it match the display refresh rates won't affect the audio quality much but it will get rid of frame repeats / drops completely. If you care about audio quality, the Sanear Audio Renderer in Wasapi mode is the preferred choice. Anything less than 3% in clock adjustments will yield max audio quality. So even if you have a 24Hz refresh rate, adjusting 23.976fps to play at 24fps won't affect audio quality.
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T1beriu - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
Windows Image Viewer has a function that can rotate the image and auto-saves it after rotation.ganeshts - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
:) I do know that, but, then, the FLIR logo as well as the temperature reading are going to be upside down. Wanted to give importance to the temperature reading in particular, and so, the upside down picture remains.bug77 - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
Why would anyone waste the precious little space on this tiny box on a D-Sub connector?Flunk - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
I assume because it's cheap and cheap monitors only have VGA ports.bug77 - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
True, but you have to look really hard to find a monitor that only has analog VGA and doesn't have at least a DVI connector (and you can convert from HDMI to DVI).Maybe if they left D-Sub out and shaved a few bucks off the price that would have been a better choice.
DanNeely - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
A lot of these type of computers are being used not for new installations; but to replace older ones in existing installs where they need to plug into the existing (typically VGA) setup. The displays (especially customer facing ones) in a lot of point of sale setups are physically integrated into the rest of the checkout/conveyer belt/etc setup and much harder and more expensive to replace than just getting a $100 bottom end display from your local computer boxmart.xenol - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
Still feel like they should throw in DVI with a DVI to VGA cable, unless there's a driving reason to stick with VGA beyond connecting to older equipment.colinstu - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
You also have to look really hard at those monitors you're talking about if they actually come with a DVI cable. They usually only come with VGA included.Uplink10 - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
Not true, why does AsRock Beebox then have DP, HDMI ports even though it has very good and low price? Are you trying to tell tha monitors with a low price have only VGA ports? You are wrong.V900 - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
Because it's still a universal standard? And because it offers some advantages over HDMI & co.No HDCP getting in the way for example...
casteve - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
"Even though this is a power virus test, the chassis temperatures reach an uncomfortable 75 C. ECS has taken the unenviable task of providing passive cooling for a 6W TDP SoC in a plastic chassis, and the problems are evident. It is likely that a chassis design similar to that of the Zotac C-series nano units (with perforations all around) could help with this aspect."Maybe. I found the Zotac CI320 to have a 60+ min thermal tail with steady state idle temp of 50C. Perhaps a solution with both the perforated case of the Zotac and the better heatsink of the Liva would cut it. I think 6W TDP is the limit of what you can put in a plastic case. Beyond this, you need a metal case plate or a fan.
Thanks for the review.
takeshi7 - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
Can you please review the Liva Core, next?hojnikb - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
I wish someone made Core M PCs. Silvermont is okay for light tasks, but thats about it.And Core M could be easily passivly cooled.
takeshi7 - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
ECS makes the Liva Core. It has a passively cooled Core M.johnsonx - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - link
Recently sold some MSI Cubi systems to clients, really nice. All use Haswell SoC's, commonly available are dual-core 1.5Ghz Celeron, 1.9Ghz Pentium, and 2.0Ghz Core i3 with Hyper-threading. They do have fans, but are VERY quiet.nathanddrews - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
AMD really needs to get new Carrizo (non-L) into this category if they can. It would be HTPC and light gaming PERFECTION.V900 - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
Having looked into both Bay Trail as well as Braswell recently when I wanted a passively cooled mini PC, I came away pretty disappointed with Braswell.The unfortunate truth is, that despite the Braswell N3050/3150 being a 14nm part, and the Bay Trail J1800/1900 a 22nm part, in most use cases the Bay Trail is faster than the Braswell.
Most users would be better off getting the older Bay Trail system with the dual core J1800 CPU or the quadcore J1900. Why?
First of all Intel cut down power usage TOO MUCH. So much that it impacts performance. The Bay Trail parts have a 10W TDP, and manage to be cooled passively just fine. The Braswell parts have 4/6W TDP, and if you want to know where Intel found the additional Watts, look at the base clock.
The Braswell parts turboclock to just over 2GHZ, but the rest of the time they skip along at a pretty slow 1.6 GHZ.
The Bay Trail quadcore part on the other hand has a base clock of 2 GHZ but turbos up to 2.4, whereas the dualcore J1800 has a base clock of 2.4 GHZ, and turbos up to 2.6 GHZ.
That's why the Bay Trail parts are faster at most tasks then the newer Braswell. If you look at some of the reviews you'll see how they handily beat them in most benchmarks...
BMNify - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
i cant see the point of any of these low power soc no matter what purpose , if it doesn't have avx/2 ( and none of these do) and at least quad cores its no better than the other 2006 sse4 simd available since Penryn then its already obsolete , IMO not even really good enough for the bargain basement generic £20 wifi router in 2015V900 - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
You're being waaay to performance-snobbish here.Don't see the point? It's 2015 man! Intel has squeezed so much performance out of X86 that these their cheapest CPUs are fast enough for most people.
They're fine for everyday computing tasks, as long as your needs are just basic web surfing, YouTube/movie playing and light Office work.
My dad uses one for the above. Yeah, he could have gotten something with an i3 or i5 but he wanted something quiet, and for most tasks the speed difference is barely noticeable.
They also have plenty of horsepower (and Intel quicksync video) to be a nifty and silent media center. And really cheap too. You can get one an embedded CPU, mini Itx motherboard and 4gb ram, for less or right around a hundred dollars.
BMNify - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
see below for the many of the 5v/2A arm boxes that have real HDMI2 at 60fps HW/SW playback of UHD1 content....as long as intel do not provide the 2015 options (avx2 ,HDMI2/UHD1/60P etc instead of 2006 simd etc) on these low power SOC they will never pass the profitable ARM quad/octacore UHD compliant boxes we can buy right now....
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - link
Hi BMN! Not everyone out there is concerned with video playback for a system like this. As a small/cheap/quiet word processor and e-mail fetcher, platforms like the Liva x2 are perfectly suitable. Also, many people don't really worry much over specific decoding capabilities. As long as their new little computer can stream YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu, there's nothing to worry about and digging into the specifics isn't important or relevant.kmmatney - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
I have a baytrail 3735D (quad core), which benchmarks about the same as the Braswell N3050, and while it seems fast enough most of the time, there are way to many instances where it skips and lags. Maybe it has to do with the eMMC storage, the overall experience isn't great. It's fine for a little while, but open up a few web pages, and things suddenly slow way down (with 2GB of RAM).BillyONeal - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
Perhaps you meant envelope ?
experttech - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
I just built a ASROCK N3150 B based HTPC and am quite impressed with the performance. The quad core chip comes for the same price as the N3050 and is quite impressive at I think it was like 6 watts of power. First time using a fanless CPU it feels awesome and weird when you turn on the system. You don't really feel its turned on! Perfect for watching all kinds of movies!BMNify - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
you are far better off buying any Amlogic S812 or related HTPC box with http://www.cnx-software.com/ that comes with HDMI2 at 60fps HW/SW playback NEON 128-bit SIMD (and encode if its activated) as a generic option than even the very latest Atom x5 x5-Z8300 that yet again removes AVX/2 SIMD and is by all accounts not even as good as the antiquated Atom-Z3735F Q1'14 http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Atom-x5-x5-Z8300-vs-..."Instruction set extensions
SSE2
SSE4
SSE3
EM64T
SSE
SSE4.1
SSE4.2
Supplemental SSE3
AES
Supports dynamic frequency scaling N
owarchild - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
BMNify, I'm not aware of any Amlogic S812 box with HDMI 2.0, can you give an example? CPU wise, Braswell is more powerful than Amlogic S812, for example a N3150 can decode H264 Hi10p. It's a pitty that Anandtech doesn't test the Braswell boxes with the latest OpenELEC beta versions...BMNify - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
see http://kodi.wiki/view/Android_hardware for list to start with several Rockchip ,Amlogic, and x1 devices are capable, you need to review them and choose your requirementssearch "Amlogic HDMI 2" etc and try here for a device that suits you http://www.geekbuying.com/Search/?keyword=RK3288
emblemparade - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
I have the original LIVA, which has a N2807, and costs about the same as this new one. I love it!The only reason to "upgrade" would be for the better GPU and slightly better wifi. The CPUs, in fact, are equal in ability: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2263&cmp[]=2541
But actually, the X2 seems like a worse machine. It's bigger and sips more power. If you're interested in this box, consider getting the original model if you can find it!
ZachSaw - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
For so many years Anandtech's HTPC reviews have been spreading misconceptions about the 23.976Hz refresh rate. As an avid reader, I used to think getting the perfect 23.976Hz refresh rate is all you need and have spent countless hours trying to do that with the various HTPCs I've owned over the years.As you used madVR to test HTPC "credentials", it unfortunately lacks an important metric in its debug OSD -- the actual frame rate the video is being played back. This takes the reference clock into account - so even if the display refresh rate says 23.976Hz (which in this case isn't even close - it's only 23.974Hz), you still have to multiply that by refclk (-ve makes it even lower). As you could see in your own screenshot, you still get a frame drop every half an hour. The unfortunate thing about this is, every ECS LIVA x2 box is going to have a slightly different rate.
And let's not forget that not all sources are 23.976fps - some are true 24p video, others are 60p etc. Some monitors still don't report 60Hz in its EDID!
To get true frame drop-/repeat-free playback, your media player needs to have the ability to do something like Reclock. Most of you probably haven't noticed but the DirectSound Audio Renderer (or any non-exclusive audio renderers) already resamples your audio before it goes out to your audio card (the only case where it doesn't resample is when your audio stream is the exact match of your Windows global audio settings and nothing else is playing audio). As such, asking the audio renderer to resample the audio a bit to make it match the display refresh rates won't affect the audio quality much but it will get rid of frame repeats / drops completely. If you care about audio quality, the Sanear Audio Renderer in Wasapi mode is the preferred choice. Anything less than 3% in clock adjustments will yield max audio quality. So even if you have a 24Hz refresh rate, adjusting 23.976fps to play at 24fps won't affect audio quality.
MPDN has an open source implementation of Reclock (to be used with either DirectSound or Sanear Audio Renderer) - https://github.com/zachsaw/MPDN_Extensions/blob/ma...
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - link
Why not run the thermal test with the top of the unit off?