ECS LIVA Z3 Plus Review: Compact Comet Lake NUC Clone Cuts Corners

HTPC Credentials - I

The ECS LIVA Z3 Plus comes with two display outputs - a mini-DP one and a HDMI 2.0 port. Both support 4Kp60 output. We evaluated the HTPC aspects with the unit connected to a LG 34WK95U-W monitor over HDMI. The monitor supports HDR, though we were unable to activate it from the LIVA Z3 Plus.

Usually, the HTPC evaluation is done with HDR turned on, but the above issue prevented us from adopting the usual flow.

Display Refresh Rate Testing

We tested out various display refresh rates ranging from 23.976 Hz to 59.94 Hz. Of particular interest is the 23.976 Hz (23p) setting, which Intel used to have trouble with in the pre-Broadwell days.

The gallery below presents screenshots from the other refresh rates that were tested. The system has no trouble maintaining a fairly accurate refresh rate throughout the duration of the video playback.

YouTube Streaming

The move to 4K, and the need to evaluate HDR support have made us choose Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video as our test sample moving forward. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode. We played back the video in non-HDR mode due to the issue mentioned at the beginning of this section.

For non-HDR playback, MS Edge gets the 4Kp60 VP9 encode from the YouTube servers. However, the playback was punctuated by a large number of dropped frames as shown in the statistics segment of the above screenshot. These frame drops actually made the video noticeably stutter particularly when any overlay was active. Eliminating the overlays reduced the issue somewhat. Various metrics of interest such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption were recorded for the first four minutes of the playback of the above video (overlays active during the beginning and end of the graphing duration). The numbers are graphed below.

Given that the Frost Canyon NUC had no trouble playing back 4Kp60 videos, we were puzzled by this issue. After completing our review process, we swapped out the 1x 4GB DDR4-2666 SO-DIMM for 2x 8GB DDR4-2133 SO-DIMM that we had in our parts drawer from the early days of DDR4. The move to dual-channel RAM (even one with a lower operating frequency) completely eliminated the playback issues even with overlays active.

The power consumption numbers are also shown in the graph above. Even in the initial segment where the process of triggering the full-screen playback occurs, the usage numbers are well under 100% (unlike the single channel DRAM case). Power consumption averages around 20W in both cases.