ECS has put together a pretty affordable package with the LIVA X². Based on the Intel NUC platform, there is only so much that can be done while remaining as affordable as possible, and since its inception, ECS's LIVA brand has been exactly about that: affordability.

I think a lot of us are pretty spoiled by the computing hardware we have in our homes. I know I am. With gaming being a primary focus of my own personal PC needs, it is easy to forget that not everything about the PC is gaming, and there are far simpler tasks that can be done with far less horsepower. Waiting a moment or two for things to run isn't always an issue. My kids are the perfect example of this; although young, they seem to have patience in spades, so they don't mind waiting for things to happen on their PCs. They are simply glad to have them in the first place, now that they are of the age that having word-processing capabilities on an electronic device is a fact of life and their education may be hampered without it. Meanwhile, using the Internet to communicate with their friends is a focus too, no matter what my own personal opinions are about that. All that said, having four kids means that those first compute devices I give them really must focus on as much performance for the dollar as possible, and the ECS LIVA X² delivers on that. Thanks to the included Windows 8.1 key, I don't have much to worry about what they are doing on their PCs, since intelligent monitoring is built right into the OS, providing weekly updates on how they are using these, so much so that I know how long each PC has been on down to the second. I know what apps they use, where they search for things, and pretty much anything else any concerned parent wants to know. While those things are part of the OS, matching that with functional hardware for a couple hundred dollars is no easy task, but that's exactly what you get with the ECS LIVA X².

Devices like this aren't for everybody. They aren't going to play most games. They aren't very fast. There's not a huge amount of storage. Yet I have four of these devices in my house in use daily, at a cost well under $800. I can check my emails in any room, stream content from my main PC to any of my digital panels, I can browse the web or watch Netflix without any issues and wherever I want. In today's connected life, these are things I can't do without, and at this price, neither should you.