The Board - A Closer Look

The rear I/O area is fitted with HDMI and D-SUB for video connectivity, along with a port for LAN, USB 2.0, and USB 3.0, each. The mini-USB port is actually the power plug. Looking around the PCB, I noticed a socketed BIOS near one of the heatsink's corners.


With 2 GB of RAM included, there are four SK Hynix memory chips near the PCB's edge, two on the back side and two on the front, peeking out from under the ECS BAT-MINI's bright red heatsink. There is also the mini-PCIe slot, which I installed the wireless card into while taking these pictures. That will be one of the first things you will do to put this Mini PC Kit together.


I located a Realtek 8111GS LAN controller on the board's bottom side, along with another chip I could not identify, although it is probably the VRM controller.


That brings us to the audio chip, which is hidden under the ECS BAT-MINI's heatsink. I also found the eMMC chip, 32 GB in size for this model, here.


Removing that cooler only took taking off two screws, and it's nice to see that ECS used screws instead of plastic push-pins. With its clothes off, the ECS BAT-MINI is pretty impressive to me. Considering the Intel Bay Trail-M SoC makes up for most of the board's cost, I am more than satisfied by the performance and limited capabilities offered here.

That is basically it for the compute portion of the ECS LIVA Mini PC Kit; the rest is within the board's Bay-Trail-M SoC that sits under the heatsink. So let us move on to putting this kit together.