When I first read about the MK808B Pro with Amlogic S905 processor and it was coming out I was immediately excited. My first Android device was the MK808 non b and I have been an addict since. I have to admit that it is my favorite form factor and I am a little biased. I really like the small size and I can tuck it away behind my TV and not have to see it. There are some tradeoffs no Ethernet or S/PDIF and heat and wifi issues….but I am ok with this. For about $30 usd I can’t complain.
While using it for the past couple weeks I have found it on par with other S905 devices I have reviewed. Everything seems to work. I did have some weird boots where everything seemed sluggish. After rebooting it seemed fine. I will try to track this down and report it to the manufacturer when I have some time.
I also have always had heat issues on sticks and I have a rig that I made with a cpu fan, potentiometer, and a sacrificed usb cable. I use the potentiometer as a variable resistor so I can slow the fan down so I don’t hear it. I have always added some extra cooling to this form factor so I was expecting this. Without the fan this one gets up to about 80+ degrees Celsius and starts throttling the cpu. With fan and heat sink stays around 40 degrees Celsius even when I run the stress test. Doing this should extend the life of the device and get maximum performance.
I had to do one slight mod to the rom. In the factory firmware multi-tasking is impossible. As soon as the app loses focus android closes to help with memory management. A way around it is to rename or delete /system/etc/allowbackgroundapp.list. This allows multitasking but with a trade off if you are jumping around a lot you will manually have to kill old apps. They did make this convenient if you want to kill all running apps with a button at the bottom of task manager or you can swipe off one at a time like usual.
I also removed a lot of the apps I don’t use. The stick is pre rooted so it is really easy to do.
All the 4k movies I have tried play well except really high bitrate ones. H.265 10bit 4k worked with MX player and Kodi and seemed to play smooth although in Kodi audio dropped out a couple times. H.265 10bit 4k was the hard one until the current generation processor. 4k VP9 is not support by this one and we will have to wait on the S905X.
Wifi performance seemed mediocre. Before I pulled out the antenna and let the antenna flag fly I got between 2.5MB/s and 3MB/s when I transferred a file from NAS drive to internal nand from an AP about 2 feet away and about 1 MB/s about 40’ away through several walls. I tested again same scenario except flagged pulled out I got 3MB/s and 3.5MB/s for the close AP and between 1.5MB/s and 2MB/s on the furthest one. I also connected an Asix 10/100 usb to Ethernet adapter and got between 7MB/s and 8MB/s.
A nice rom is already out by Neomode here http://freaktab.com/forum/tv-player-...5-mxq-pro-s905 and most of my final testing was done with it.
I would suspect a port of Openelec soon for this device when a developer picks it up. It is starting to show up on other S905 devices.
It is currently the most cost effective S905 device right now but you are going to have to live with some caveats. Addressing cooling and wifi are simple mods that can be done and will make the device an excellent value. I do recommend Neomode’s rom right now if you plan on using an Ethernet adapters but stock worked well for me as well.
I would like to thank Geekbuying for sending me a review sample and if you would like to pick one up from them here is the link.
http://goo.gl/Zo5SKOl
If you would like me to test something specific leave a comment.
While using it for the past couple weeks I have found it on par with other S905 devices I have reviewed. Everything seems to work. I did have some weird boots where everything seemed sluggish. After rebooting it seemed fine. I will try to track this down and report it to the manufacturer when I have some time.
I also have always had heat issues on sticks and I have a rig that I made with a cpu fan, potentiometer, and a sacrificed usb cable. I use the potentiometer as a variable resistor so I can slow the fan down so I don’t hear it. I have always added some extra cooling to this form factor so I was expecting this. Without the fan this one gets up to about 80+ degrees Celsius and starts throttling the cpu. With fan and heat sink stays around 40 degrees Celsius even when I run the stress test. Doing this should extend the life of the device and get maximum performance.
I had to do one slight mod to the rom. In the factory firmware multi-tasking is impossible. As soon as the app loses focus android closes to help with memory management. A way around it is to rename or delete /system/etc/allowbackgroundapp.list. This allows multitasking but with a trade off if you are jumping around a lot you will manually have to kill old apps. They did make this convenient if you want to kill all running apps with a button at the bottom of task manager or you can swipe off one at a time like usual.
I also removed a lot of the apps I don’t use. The stick is pre rooted so it is really easy to do.
All the 4k movies I have tried play well except really high bitrate ones. H.265 10bit 4k worked with MX player and Kodi and seemed to play smooth although in Kodi audio dropped out a couple times. H.265 10bit 4k was the hard one until the current generation processor. 4k VP9 is not support by this one and we will have to wait on the S905X.
Wifi performance seemed mediocre. Before I pulled out the antenna and let the antenna flag fly I got between 2.5MB/s and 3MB/s when I transferred a file from NAS drive to internal nand from an AP about 2 feet away and about 1 MB/s about 40’ away through several walls. I tested again same scenario except flagged pulled out I got 3MB/s and 3.5MB/s for the close AP and between 1.5MB/s and 2MB/s on the furthest one. I also connected an Asix 10/100 usb to Ethernet adapter and got between 7MB/s and 8MB/s.
A nice rom is already out by Neomode here http://freaktab.com/forum/tv-player-...5-mxq-pro-s905 and most of my final testing was done with it.
I would suspect a port of Openelec soon for this device when a developer picks it up. It is starting to show up on other S905 devices.
It is currently the most cost effective S905 device right now but you are going to have to live with some caveats. Addressing cooling and wifi are simple mods that can be done and will make the device an excellent value. I do recommend Neomode’s rom right now if you plan on using an Ethernet adapters but stock worked well for me as well.
I would like to thank Geekbuying for sending me a review sample and if you would like to pick one up from them here is the link.
http://goo.gl/Zo5SKOl
If you would like me to test something specific leave a comment.
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