The folks from ECS Taiwan sent us the latest model of their LIVA Mini PC Kit. The kit still needs to be assembled, just like a regular desktop PC but it only took us a few minutes to set up the whole system.
ECS claims the LIVA is the world’s smallest PC and, as such, most of the parts and peripherals are miniaturized to fit in such a small box.
The motherboard is the basis for the size of the whole rig and it is only as wide as a 5-inch smartphone.
The Atom processor is already soldered into the board and covered by a larger aluminum heat sink (in orange) for better heat management. The 2GB RAM module is also soldered to the board as well to save space.
The back side of the motherboard is the socket for the eMMC slot for internal storage. This allows for option to upgrade the storage from the default 32GB to 128GB.
Shown below is the eMMC chip, before it is attached into the board. It’s a little bigger than a regular microSD card. This is user-replaceable so if you want to upgrade the capacity in the future, just open the box and unscrewed the chip from the board.
The rear side of the board is where all of the ports are placed, protruding a bit so they fit into the box later once it is assembled. There’s a VGA port and an HDMI port for display out into a monitor or TV.
The two USB ports are stacked on top of each other with one having USB 3.0 support.
There’s a LAN port as well if you don’t want to use the built-in WiFi radio. The micro-USB port is for the power adaptor. This means you can also power up the LIVA using a regular powerbank.
The hardware configuration is almost the same as that of a Windows 8 tablet.
LIVA Mini PC Kit:
Intel Bay Trail-M 1.6GHz dual-core processor
Intel HD Graphics
2GB DDR3 RAM
32GB or 64GB eMMC
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 4.0
USB 2.0 port
USB 3.0 port
VGA port
HDMI Port
GigaBit LAN
microUSB port (for power)
Windows 8.1 64bit
Our only problem with the set up si that the two available USB ports are already taken by the mouse and keyboard so there’s nothing left to plug into the USB port. We were able to manage this by using a 4-port USB hub and use a Bluetooth mouse instead.
We saw a lot of LIVA PCs in Computex last June for an ECS competition to dress up their PCs. You can check them out here.
The LIVA Mini PC retails for about NTD$5,500 in Taiwan.
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