A month after unveiling the Liva Z fanless mini desktop with an Intel Apollo Lake processor, ECS has introduced a more powerful model called the ECS Liva Z Plus.
The new computer will be powered by a notebook-class Intel Kaby Lake-U 15 watt processor rather than the 10 watt Celeron or Pentium chips used in the Liva Z.
The Plus model will likely be a bit more expensive, but the two desktops look virtually identical… and both are fanless, which means you shouldn’t hear any sounds emanating from the computer when it’s in use, which could make them good choices for home theater PCs, digital signage, or for setting up a podcast or music recording studio (which is why I’m kind of tempted to pick up one of these once the price and final specs are revealed).
The ECS Liva Z measures about 5″ x 4.6″ x 1.3″ and supports a VESA mount if you want to attach the computer to the back of a display.
Other features include two SO-DIMM slots for up to 8GB of DDR4 memory, an M.2 2242 SSD slot, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, HDMI and mini DisplayPort for up to two displays, three USB 3.0 ports and a USB 3.0 Type-C port, and 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.
ECS says the Liva Z Plus supports Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but the company only provide support for Windows 10 installation.