ECS LIVA x2 Review: A Compact & Fanless Braswell PC

HTPC Credentials

Given the ECS LIVA x2's fanless nature and the presence of Intel HD Graphics, we expect many purchasers to use it as a media playback machine / HTPC. Given the specifications, it is quite clear that we are not looking at a madVR capable machine, but one targeted at the entry-level / average HTPC user or someone looking for a HTPC to put in a second or third room (non-primary HTPC). There are two HTPC aspects that we will explore in this section, one related to network streaming (OTT services), and the other related to local file playback. Prior to that, we have a small sub-section dealing with refresh rate accuracy.

Refresh Rate Accurancy

Starting with Haswell, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA have been on par with respect to display refresh rate accuracy. The most important refresh rate for videophiles is obviously 23.976 Hz (the 23 Hz setting). As expected, the ECS LIVA x2 has no trouble with refreshing the display appropriately in this setting.

The gallery below presents some of the other refresh rates that we tested out. The first statistic in madVR's OSD indicates the display refresh rate.

Network Streaming Efficiency

Evaluation of OTT playback efficiency was done by playing back our standard YouTube test stream and five minutes from our standard Netflix test title. Using HTML5, the YouTube stream plays back a 720p encoding. Since YouTube now defaults to HTML5 for video playback, we have stopped evaluating Adobe Flash acceleration. Note that only NVIDIA exposes GPU and VPU loads separately. Both Intel and AMD bundle the decoder load along with the GPU load. The following two graphs show the power consumption at the wall for playback of the HTML5 stream (MP4/AVC @ 1080p) in Mozilla Firefox (v 40.0.2).

GPU load was around 41.53% for the YouTube HTML5 stream and 8.26% for the steady state 6 Mbps Netflix streaming case.

Netflix streaming evaluation was done using the Windows 8.1 Netflix app. Manual stream selection is available (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S) and debug information / statistics can also be viewed (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D). Statistics collected for the YouTube streaming experiment were also collected here.

The ECS LIVA series of PCs have consistently been amongst the most power-efficient OTT streaming boxes around. The LIVA x2 is not the most efficient, but it is still quite a bit lower than the other passively cooled mini-PCs that we have evaluated before.

Decoding and Rendering Benchmarks

Prior to testing out the decoding and rendering performance, we take a look at the DXVA decoding support available via Intel's Braswell GPU drivers. Note that we using v10.18.14.4234 of the Intel HD Graphics Drivers for Braswell and DXVA Checker v3.60 (compared to v10.18.14.4214 and v3.50 respectively that we used in the ASRock Beebox review)

The codec support has not changed, though DXVA Checker now confirms explicitly that VP8 and VP9 DXVA decoding support for Braswell doesn't exist (at least on Windows 8.1). As we already know from the Beebox review, the above screenshot confirms hardware acceleration for MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264 and HEVC. However, there is no HEVC Main10 support.

In order to evaluate local file playback, we concentrate on EVR-CP and Kodi. We already know that EVR works quite well even with the Intel IGP for our test streams. In our earlier reviews, we focused on presenting the GPU loading and power consumption at the wall in a table (with problematic streams in bold). Starting with the Broadwell NUC review, we decided to represent the GPU load and power consumption in a graph with dual Y-axes. Nine different test streams of 90 seconds each were played back with a gap of 30 seconds between each of them. The characteristics of each stream are annotated at the bottom of the graph. Note that the GPU usage is graphed in red and needs to be considered against the left axis, while the at-wall power consumption is graphed in green and needs to be considered against the right axis.

All the clips played back comfortably in Kodi. In MPC-HC v1.7.9, the 1080i clips occasionally hit 100% GPU loading, but no visible frame drops were seen. This is in contrast to the ASRock Beebox where we had no such issues. Perhaps a combination of change in the software as well as the DRAM in the unit has led to this substantially higher GPU loading for interlaced clips.

Moving on to HDMI audio, we find that v10.18.14.4234 Intel HD Graphics driver package has no updates to the audio driver. Dolby Digital Plus bitstreaming works well (both in the Netflix app and from various local media playback programs), but HD audio bitstreaming (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA) capability is not present.