2014-08-15, 00:59
First let me say that I have no ties with ECS and I am not trying to sell these devices. I'm just wanting to share my success with fellow XBMC (Kodi *puke*) users.
Since starting with XBMC a few years ago I've built several small foot print pc's and installed the quietest fans I could find in them.. everything possible in the search for a silent htpc. I recently took a gamble and bought an ECS Liva 32gb model (they are coming out with a 64gb model shortly) and installed windows 8.1 on it. These boxes are fanless, about the size of 2 packs of playing cards stacked ontop of one another, have built in eMMC storage, 2gb of ram and a pretty weak processor but to my surprise it's more than enough to run Windows 8.1 and XBMC quiet effectively.
I've tested with:
1080P 24hz, 50hz and 60hz
DTS-HD and regular DTS
Streamed HD off youtube
Tried Steam Streaming
All worked perfectly and there was no dropped frames over a 100mbit wired network.
Disk Space concern. It comes with 32gb of disk space. After installing Windows 8.1 and updates it left me with 15gb. After xbmc and indexing my 17tb of TV shows / Movies I was left with 11gb. You don't have a ton of space to screw around with. It does have a USB 3.0 port so you could plug in a usb 3.0 memory key and use this for some things I suppose. A 64gb version is being released according to the ECS Liva website.
Windows Defender - Turn off the real time scanning. The speed improvement was massive.
Drivers - Install all the drivers off the CD before judging it's speed. Also if you want DTS-HD you have to install the audio drivers off the Intel website directly.
Questions?
Since starting with XBMC a few years ago I've built several small foot print pc's and installed the quietest fans I could find in them.. everything possible in the search for a silent htpc. I recently took a gamble and bought an ECS Liva 32gb model (they are coming out with a 64gb model shortly) and installed windows 8.1 on it. These boxes are fanless, about the size of 2 packs of playing cards stacked ontop of one another, have built in eMMC storage, 2gb of ram and a pretty weak processor but to my surprise it's more than enough to run Windows 8.1 and XBMC quiet effectively.
I've tested with:
1080P 24hz, 50hz and 60hz
DTS-HD and regular DTS
Streamed HD off youtube
Tried Steam Streaming
All worked perfectly and there was no dropped frames over a 100mbit wired network.
Disk Space concern. It comes with 32gb of disk space. After installing Windows 8.1 and updates it left me with 15gb. After xbmc and indexing my 17tb of TV shows / Movies I was left with 11gb. You don't have a ton of space to screw around with. It does have a USB 3.0 port so you could plug in a usb 3.0 memory key and use this for some things I suppose. A 64gb version is being released according to the ECS Liva website.
Windows Defender - Turn off the real time scanning. The speed improvement was massive.
Drivers - Install all the drivers off the CD before judging it's speed. Also if you want DTS-HD you have to install the audio drivers off the Intel website directly.
Questions?