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

Power Consumption and Thermal Characteristics

The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 4K display being driven through the HDMI port of the system. In the graph below, we compare the idle and load power of the ACEMAGIC T8 Plus and the ECS LIVA Q3D with other systems evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, as well as our custom stress test with Prime95 / Furmark, and noted the peak as well as idling power consumption at the wall.

The numbers are consistent with the presence of active fans, as well as the TDP and suggested PL1 / PL2 values for the processors in the systems. The idling numbers are quite good, as aspect that requires proper configuration of C-states in the default BIOS settings.

Stress Testing

Our thermal stress routine is a combination of Prime95, Furmark, and Finalwire's AIDA64 System Stability Test. The following 9-step sequence is followed, starting with the system at idle:

• Start with the Prime95 stress test configured for maximum power consumption
• After 30 minutes, add Furmark GPU stress workload
• After 30 minutes, terminate the Prime95 workload
• After 30 minutes, terminate the Furmark workload and let the system idle
• After 30 minutes of idling, start the AIDA64 System Stress Test (SST) with CPU, caches, and RAM activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with the GPU, CPU, caches, and RAM activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with only the GPU activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with the CPU, GPU, caches, RAM, and SSD activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the AIDA64 SST and let the system idle for 30 minutes

Traditionally, this test used to record the clock frequencies - however, with the increasing number of cores in modern processors and fine-grained clock control, frequency information makes the graphs cluttered and doesn't contribute much to understanding the thermal performance of the system. The focus is now on the power consumption and temperature profiles to determine if throttling is in play.

In the T8 Plus, Prime 95 sees the Intel Processor N95 start off around 15W for the package, but that drops down to around 12W midway. Usually, this happens due to thermal throttling, but a look at the temperatures in the graph below sees the package / core temperatures just north of 80C. It appears that ACEMAGIC has configured the BIOS to throttle prematurely, as the temperatures are otherwise kept south of 80C throughout the stress test. Putting Prime95 and Furmark together sees the package maintaining a smooth 15W throughout the segment. Loading up the GPU alone keeps the package power around 10W.

The LIVA Q3D has a PL2 of 25W, but the spike is imperceptible in the 1 second polling interval used in the graph above. ECS has no qualms about maintaining the temperatures around 90C to sustain 10W for the Jasper Lake processor.

It is interesting to note that the thermal solution of the T8 Plus seems more effective than the LIVA Q3D. At the same time, we have to keep in mind that the LIVA is much more compact. The raised chassis design of the T8 Plus also possibly contributes to better airflow. Overall, it would have been nice to see lower temperatures on the LIVA Q3D, but ECS is able to guarantee the ability to dissipate the rated 10W package power for the Pentium Silver N6000.