When I looked at the ECS LIVA Mini PC Kit about a year ago, my overall experience was very positive. The device is compact, lightweight, very well built, and offered incredible value for its price. The tiny barebone system was fun to put together; and even though I did not beat the "60 seconds" ECS challenge, I came pretty close. The ECS LIVA Mini PC Kit has been running Windows 8.1 since, before being upgraded to Windows 10 recently. The unit became a staple in our living room, permanently hooked to the HDTV and used daily for streaming online content and local media playback, with the occasional web browsing. Intel's Bay Trail-M SoC was up to the task and performed nicely overall.

Today I will be taking a look at the next generation of mini PCs from ECS, the LIVA X2 (read X Squared). The unit is built around the Intel Braswell SoC and comes with a 14nm Intel Celeron N3050 CPU. The RAM and storage configurations available are 2GB of DDR3L RAM and 32GB eMMC storage, or 4GB of DDR3L RAM and 64GB eMMC storage. With the release of the LIVA X2, ECS not only improved the hardware but also opted for different design choices. This should make the LIVA X2 more user-friendly and boost the performance, while looking sleek in any living room setting.