ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 technical details

Published · Last revised

Microsoft is now selling a ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop PC in its Store to facilitate Windows on ARM development. (You may remember this machine by its former name--the Snapdragon Development Kit.)

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of information on the Internet about this machine in one spot and the manufacturer is not very forthcoming with information. So I ordered one and opened it up, so you don't have to.

Photos

https://gist.github.com/riverar/a1aef6224e1e24783596f7e35a9e4103

Documentation

Quick Start

Scanned paper copy (QC710_QuickStart_11182021_600.pdf). Not worth slicing up or reading.

Manual

Digital copy (QC710_UM_11242020.2.pdf). ECS assures me this is applicable to the ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710.

Specifications

External

Dimensions 119mm width x 116.6mm height x 35mm depth
Weight 220g
Power SunWard 30W USB-C Wall Charger with Power Delivery (PD) (UL Listed)
Energy Star Energy Star Computers Specification Version 8.0[1] (not certified)
FCC ID WL6-7180PQC710
Case Screws 4 x Phillips 4mm x 6mm, under rubber ring

Internal

Processor Qualcomm SC7180 (7c)[2]
Graphics Adreno 618[2:1]
Memory LPDDR4X Dual-channel 16-bit (32-bit) @ 2133 MHz[2:2], up to 4GB
Modem X15 LTE (800 Mbit/s down, 150 Mbit/s up, theoretical)[2:3]
Connectivity Bluetooth 5, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad/ax, GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo, QZSS, SBAS, NavIC; USB 3.1; eMMC 5.1, UFS 3.0[2:4]
Storage eMMC 5.1, up to 64GB
Ethernet 10/100/1000M

Software

The ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop ships with customized Windows 10 Home (19043.928) out of the box and requires the out-of-box experience to be completed before use.

Windows Recovery

Mount Windows Partition

  1. Plug a USB keyboard into the secondary USB port on the side of the box.

  2. Plug a Windows PC (host) into the rear of the box (target) via the primary USB-A port.

  3. Power on the box and hold ESC until the Boot Device Selection (BDS) menu appears.

  4. Type 3 or use the keyboard arrow keys to select Enter Shell.

  5. At the shell, issue the command: FS1:.

  6. At the shell, issue the command: UsbfnMsdApp.efi -m "Basic data partition".

    You should see the output below:

    UEFI Interactive Shell v2.1
    EDK II
    UEFI v2.70 (Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., 0x00000000)
    Shell> FS1:\UsbfnMsdApp.efi -m "Basic data partition"
    ProcessCmdLineArgs:  Setting Basic data partition  on 0
    SelectCmdLinePartitions: CmdLine Mounting!
    SelectCmdLinePartitions: Mounting 49 and 65535
    MountSelection: Mounting Basic data partition On Lun 0
    MountSelection:  Press Any Key To Unmount
    
  7. At this point, the USB keyboard connected to the box will no longer be functional. That's normal.

  8. On the host PC, you should see a new driver letter assigned to the target Windows volume.

Replace Windows Installation

  1. Using File Explorer, right-click the mounted target Windows volume and click Format. Be careful and select the right volume!
  2. Use the following options to format the volume:
    • File system: NTFS
    • Allocation unit size: 4096
    • Volume label: Windows
    • Format options: Quick Format (checked)
  3. Obtain a Windows (Arm) installation ISO and double-click it to mount in File Explorer.
  4. Open an elevated command prompt and issue the command: dism /Apply-Image /ImageFile:X:\Sources\install.wim /ApplyDir:Y:\, replacing X: with the letter assigned to the mounted installation media and Y: with the letter assigned to the target Windows partition.
  5. Download and extract the QC710 driver package to a temporary location.
  6. Issue the command: dism /Image:Y:\ /Add-Driver /Driver:C:\Path\To\Extracted\Driver\Package /Recurse.
  7. Use the Safely remove hardware and eject media icon in the system tray to eject the mass storage device.

Complete Windows Installation

  1. Hold the power button to turn off the box. (It is highly recommended you eject the device first!)
  2. Turn on the box.
  3. Wait until Windows finishes its installation stages and presents the out-of-box experience (OOBE). This will take approximately 15-30 minutes.
  4. Complete OOBE and set up your PC, as normal.
  5. Open Device Manager and verify it is clean.

  1. Energy Star Computers Specification Version 8.0 - Energy Star, 2019 ↩︎

  2. List of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors - Wikipedia, 2021 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎