The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H based on the Meteor Lake architecture does come with quite a unique core architecture, with 4 Redwood P-Cores, 8 Crestmont E-Cores and 2 LP E-Cores for a total of 18 total threads (P-Cores feature HT), does integrate a dedicated NPU for supporting the latest AI platforms, while the GPU is based on Intel Arc Graphics with 7 Xe cores supporting the latest technologies including Ray Tracing. As we have noted from the test results the ECS LIVA 7 Plus is topping our charts in terms of performance and one of the main reasons would be the lack of aggressive power capping other models do employ to accommodate less elaborated cooling systems.

ECS manages to obtain on this mini-PC good temperatures in Full Load thanks to the dual fan system, also succeeding to keep the storage drives nice and cool! As we have seen from other small systems based on Intel SoCs, in low loads the cores do spike a bit higher in terms of frequency (boost) but for a very short time frame; in those cases, we may see the total system power consumption reach up to 80W, but in Full Load on all cores, including the GPU, the power consumption will be lower at about 60W. The fans are surprisingly silent for such a powerful mini machine so with an ambient of 26.9 dBA, we have recorded about 29.5 dBA in IDLE and not more than 35.1 dBA in Full Load, which is quite impressive!

We have also measured the power consumption of the system at the wall, so in IDLE we have obtained about 5.6W, while in Full Load the total power consumption recorded was 73.3W.

The LIVA Z7 Plus does come with the latest technologies in terms of connectivity, with plenty of USB ports, some of which also driving video signal (resulting in support for quad 4K displays or 8K UHD up to 60Hz refresh rate), we have WiFi 6E support with the internal card pre-installed but also dual M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots (2280 and 2242) for installing quite a bit of storage. Of course, LAN connectivity is not forgotten, so we do have available one 2.5Gbit and one Gigabit interface for different applications. RAM support is available up to 5600MT/s and we can install up to 96GB if we need to work with multiple projects at once.

In terms of gaming, this tiny system would handle well older games up to FHD resolution, even with higher detail levels and will also handle more recent competitive gaming titles but do not expect here getting hundreds of frames as compared to a dedicated GPU solution. We are really happy Intel has reached such a performance level to be comparable with other APUs by AMD from the same era so competition is always great!

We haven't yet been communicated the price of this mini-PC but we will surely update the article when/if we get this information!

ECS LIVA Z7 Plus Mini-PC is Recommended for:

We would like to thank again to ECS for making this review possible!