ECS LIVA Q3D and ACEMAGIC T8 Plus micro-PCs Review: Jasper Lake and Alder Lake-N in a Smaller-than-UCFF Package

HTPC Credentials

The 2022 Q4 update to our system reviews brings an updated HTPC evaluation suite for systems. After doing away with the evaluation of display refresh rate stability and Netflix streaming evaluation, the local media playback configurations have also seen a revamp. This section details each of the workloads processed on the ACEMAGIC T8 Plus as part of the HTPC suite.

YouTube Streaming Efficiency

YouTube continues to remain one of the top OTT platforms, primarily due to its free ad-supported tier. Our HTPC test suite update retains YouTube streaming efficiency evaluation as a metric of OTT support in different systems. Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video is the chosen test sample. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode. We were unable to get HDR working in the T8 Plus. Online forum posts suggest the need to install and configure the video output in the Intel Graphics Control application for HDMI ports driven using the DP outputs of the SoC. We opted to go ahead with non-HDR evaluation for the T8 Plus.

ACEMAGIC T8 Plus YouTube Streaming Statistics

ECS LIVA Q3D YouTube Streaming Statistics

The GPU in both systems should have no problem decoding VP9 Profile 2 videos theoretically. However, we found the LIVA Q3D having choppy playback with many dropped frames, particularly during the activation of overlays on the video. The ACEMAGIC T8 Plus had minimum problems with the non-HDR stream.

The streaming efficiency-related aspects such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption are also graphed below.

Despite the VP9 Profile 2 in the above graph, it must be noted that the comparison with the T8 Plus here is a case of apples and oranges. The LIVA Q3D is more efficient compared to the Supermicro system, but not by much.

Hardware-Accelerated Encoding and Decoding

The transcoding benchmarks in the systems performance section presented results from evaluating the QuickSync encoder within Handbrake's framework. -- ANY OTHER ENCODER TESTS REFERENCE HERE --. The capabilities of the decoder engine are brought out by DXVAChecker.

There are significant differences in the codec support. The ECS LIVA Q3D includes VP8 hardware decoding that seems to have been discarded in ADL-N. However, ADL-N includes HEVC 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 12-bit decode support. It also supports AV1. These codecs are not available in Jasper Lake.

Local Media Playback

Evaluation of local media playback and video processing is done by playing back files encompassing a range of relevant codecs, containers, resolutions, and frame rates. A note of the efficiency is also made by tracking GPU usage and power consumption of the system at the wall. Users have their own preference for the playback software / decoder / renderer, and our aim is to have numbers representative of commonly encountered scenarios. Our Q4 2022 test suite update replaces MPC-HC (in LAV filters / madVR modes) with mpv. In addition to being cross-platform and open-source, the player allows easy control via the command-line to enable different shader-based post-processing algorithms. From a benchmarking perspective, the more attractive aspect is the real-time reporting of dropped frames in an easily parseable manner. The players / configurations considered in this subsection include:

• VLC 3.0.18
• Kodi 20.0b1
• mpv 0.35 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next)
• mpv 0.35 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next, profile=gpu-hq)

Fourteen test streams (each of 90s duration) were played back from the local disk with an interval of 30 seconds in-between. Various metrics including GPU usage, at-wall power consumption, and total energy consumption were recorded during the course of this playback.

All our playback tests were done with the desktop HDR setting turned on. It is possible for certain system configurations to automatically turn on/off the HDR capabilities prior to the playback of a HDR video, but, we didn't take advantage of that in our testing.

Without HDR in the picture, the T8 Plus consumes the least energy as expected. However, it must also be noted that the decoding of the AV1 clip in software resulted in a slideshow with more than 50% of the frames getting dropped.

It is evident from the graphs that the playback of the HDR streams on the T8 Plus was a messed up exercise. However, the Q3D didn't have any problems (except for the attempted CPU decoding process for the AV1 clip).

Hardware decoding of AV1 is seen with mpv 0.35.1 on ADL-N. However, approximately half the frames are dropped during rendering (not decoding). However, the exercise as a whole was quite smooth for the other codecs.

With shader activity in the picture, the playback of most streams with the GPU-HQ profile in mpv 0.35.1 ended up being unwatchable due to the unreasonable D3D usage graphed above.