"For some reason, ECS decided to take a chassis meant for an actively cooled board and reuse it for a passively cooled one. The complete lack of support for convective cooling of the thermal module puts a huge dampener on the performance and user experience with the LIVA Z2. The fact that the motherboard / thermal module combination (JSLM-MINI) by itself performs admirably across the board only adds to the disappointment.
The thermal design of the ZBOX CI331 nano also left us a bit disappointed. The absence of proper support for cooling the SATA drive is a minor issue. However, the inability of the system to handle a 7W package (when a similarly designed system was able to handle 12W easily back in the Skylake days) warrants further investigation. The saving grace in the proactive throttling is that the system is able to deliver much higher performance for extended durations after recovering from the thermal throttling. This is not an ideal situation, but appears to be better (both from a performance and user-experience perspective) compared to the LIVA Z3."
Source: AnandTech
