At a first glance the Liva is an extremely small PC (standing at 56mm high and 118mm wide); almost as big as the Dual Shock 3 controller.  Compared to the other Mini Pcs that we have reviewed, this has got to be the smallest we have seen. The overall design of the Liva was pretty simple, some might mistook the unit as a power supply. But despite the bland cosmetic design, the port placements were conveniently placed in the most reachable areas, take for example the audio port is located in front of the unit which is very accessible due to the mini PC’s compact size and the power button is placed on the left portion of the unit, there are enough vents for an even airflow to the mini PC.

It features a USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, VGA and HDMI port that can handle a dual screen monitor set up, an Ethernet port and micro USB for the power output. Though the USB ports could use an extra slot for additional peripheral usage, this can be remedied by using a USB hub accessory.

The unit still requires some minor assembly straight out of the box, though it will take less than a minute for those hardcore PC builders and around less than 5 minutes for people who are not into PC assembly.

Intel’s Bay Trail-M SoC (System-on-a-Chip) processor made it possible for the mini PC to be very small, but can provide a decent processing power at a low power consumption in which you can event run the unit with just a power bank, we tested it with a 5200mAh power bank and it can run for an hour. It also includes the M.2 Socket Wireless Communication which has WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity; making the Liva a convenient portable PC with wireless internet connection and wireless remote for that HTPC approach. It uses the Embedded Multi-Media Card for its storage, however this limits its compatibility use for older operating systems, including Windows 7 in which you are only resorted to using Windows 8.1 or the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS OS, and not to mention the limited storage capacity (even with the 64GB variant) would only recommend that you connect an external storage if you plan to use the mini PC as a multimedia device.

For the test run on the Liva, we conducted a series of tests to see how far the mini PC can run. We first placed the mini PC to a PCMark 8 benchmark test, so far the results provided a decent score, which can be compared to low-end office PCs. While the Unigine Heaven to benchmark the Intel integrated graphics showed low scores in rendering 3D graphics.

After the benchmark tests, we proceeded with the actual stress tests on the Liva. Browsing with the Google Chrome internet browser has no issues on the performance but the CPU usage would reach around 100% when multiple tabs (around five to six) were opened, video streaming like Youtube had no issues running as well, even on 1080p resolution. Some applications such as the Open Office suite and Adobe Lightroom, had no issues running on the mini PC as well.

Watching videos was on the Liva was impressive as it can play all of the HD videos, especially 1080p videos with very minimal or unnoticeable slowdowns on the framerate, you can even try playing two HD videos simultaneously on multiple screens, which is impressive for a mini PC with an integrated graphics chip.

Playing video games however, has a different story. With the limitations of the integrated graphics, not all 3D games can be played well on the Liva, though some games such as Torchlight II can be played at a minimal settings and could run at around 20-30 fps. But 2D games can be played really smooth, from classic SNES games to King of Fighters 98 and new releases such as Castle Crasher can run at an astounding 50-60 fps.

Heating issue on the Liva was very minimal even for a fan-less thermal cooling system. Even when running on a 100% CPU load, the temperature on the Liva does not affect the performance at all, the heat even does not reach at an alarming rate.