The LIVA Q3D is a very interesting offering in a small package, allowing decent 4K media playback, browsing capabilities and office work, while using the latest Windows OS from Microsoft (W11 22H2). The 128GB of eMMC offers transfer rates like entry-level SATA SSDs but one problem could be the inclusion of only 4GB RAM which in some cases causes slowdowns as soon it gets filled and swapping occurs to the included storage. The use of lightweight versions of Windows 11 may be recommended more here, such as Tiny11, because these were designed to run on systems with as low as 2GB of RAM.

In terms of recorded temperatures and overclocking, we noted the package power spiking to over 15W in low load situations, which causes the SoC to overheat to its maximum allowed temperature; this causes immediate throttling, but the processor will continue to run at its maximum speed while in low loads, even after throttling occurs. We did double-check the contact between the SoC and the integrated cooling system and there was no issue there because the small heatsink does really become hot to the touch after a couple of minutes, so heat is transferred fine, but we think that the cooling surface is probably not large enough or the CPU voltages are too high when the speed bursts occur. In our stress tests, we loaded all cores and noted a speed decrease from 3.3GHz (max burst speed) on a single core to about 2.24GHz all-core, while the voltage went down from 1.24V (burst) to about 0.85V. This allows the CPU to handle such loads and with temps under the throttling limit (which is 105 degrees Celsius). The stock BIOS come with a PL1 power limit to 10W and after discussing with ECS, the engineers have also supplied a PL1 power limit of 6W BIOS to test; as you have noted from the separate charts, the performance drop with this particular setting is rather high and we do not really recommend it, even if the temperatures are lower in that case.

We have also performed storage testing via ATTO, to reflect the eMMC performance:

In terms of power consumption, this Mini PC is very efficient! We recorded about 7W in IDLE and about 23.5W (max recorded spike) in Full Load, while performing the AIDA64 stress testing. Regarding noise, the LIVA Q3D is virtually silent in IDLE (noted about 28.6 dBA), but the high-RPM can be heard a bit during medium and high loads, when we recorded about 32.2 dBA, which is quite manageable.

The recommended pricing for the tested LIVA Q3D is 199.9 Euros (with VAT), so quite affordable as well!

ECS LIVA Q3D Mini-PC Review is Recommended for:

We would like to thank again to ECS for making this review possible!