Little Liva Q Added To ECS AIO Mini PC Lineup

ECS announced the Liva Q, the latest addition to its Liva line of all-in-one mini-PCs. Targeted for multimedia streaming and digital signage, the Liva Q’s unique selling point is its small size, which is only 7 x 7 x 3cm.

The Liva Q comes powered by either the quad-core Pentium N4200 or the dual-core Celeron N3350 processor. Both of these 7th-gen Atom SoCs (Apollo Lake) have identical connectivity. The other variables include either 2GB or 4GB of RAM (likely not expandable given the Liva Q’s size) and either 32GB or 64GB of built-in storage.

For general connectivity, the front of the Liva Q has one USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A and one USB 2.0 Type-A port. The left side has a microSD card slot that supports cards up to 128GB. On the networking front, the Liva Q has gigabit LAN (through an RJ45 jack on the back) and built-in AC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1.

As an HTPC, the Liva Q’s most important aspect is multimedia connectivity. One HDMI port is present, and ECS took care to note that it’s HDMI 2.0, so HDCP 2.2 compliance isn’t a worry. Although Apollo Lake SoCs have no issues decoding 4K h.264/5 content, neither the N4200 nor the N3350 inherently support HDMI 2.0. Existing competitors that use these SoCs circumvent this restriction by using an internal DisplayPort to HDMI converter. The Liva Q can also be triggered to turn on and off through the HDMI port that supports HDMI-CEC.

The Liva line’s competitors include the Intel NUC, Gigabyte BRIX, and Zotac ZBox lines of products.

ECS released scant details on the Liva Q’s availability. We know that it doesn’t include a Windows 10 license, but otherwise available hardware configurations and prices are unknown.