The NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV Review: A Premium 4K Set Top Box
by Ganesh T S on May 28, 2015 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Media Streamer
- Home Theater
- TV
- 4K
- Shield
- NVIDIA
Power Consumption and Thermal Performance
In order to see what the power and thermal characteristics of the SHIELD Android TV are like, the device was tested in two scenarions:
- 1080p60 HDMI output to Pioneer VSX-32, connected to a Sony KDL46EX720 46" 1080p TV. Connected to a wired network, with a Samsung T1 SSD hanging off the USB 3.0 port
- 4Kp60 HDMI output to a Samsung HU6950 40" 4K TV. Connected to a wireless network, with a Samsung T1 SSD hanging off the USB 3.0 port.
The table below summarizes the important power consumption numbers.
| NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV Power Consumption | |
| Activity | Avg. Power (W) |
| Idle (Scenario 1) | 3.6 W |
| 1080p Netflix Streaming (Scenario 1) | 4.6 W |
| 1080p YouTube Streaming (Scenario 1) | 4.7 W |
| Kodi Playback (Hardware Accelerated 1080p60 H.264) (Scenario 1) | 6.5 W |
| Kodi Playback (Software Decoding 1080i60 VC-1) (Scenario 1) | 10.4 W |
| Idle (Scenario 2) | 4.2 W |
| 4K HEVC Playback (Scenario 2) | 9.1 W |
| 4K Netflix Streaming (Scenario 2) | 10.3 W |
| Gaming (Scenario 2) | 19.4 W |
Since the gaming scenarios stressed the at-wall power consumption heavily, we decided to run the GFXBench battery life test which puts the T-Rex benchmark in an infinite loop. After 2 hours, we took a thermal image of the unit (oriented vertically with the SHIELD stand).
The thermal solution is excellent, and the frame rates were consistent across all the benchmark runs. Thanks to the low-power SoC, the chassis temperature was just 34 C (ambient at 23 C). The fan noise was audible only when we kept our ears against the vents in the back panel.
Moving on to the business end of the review, we split up the positives and negatives into two sections - one for Android TV itself, and the other for the SHIELD.
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maxpower47 - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
There is now: https://github.com/foo86/dcadecZeDestructor - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
@maxpower47: ah yea, I saw that a few weeks ago. afaik they' re waiting on it to get merged into libav so eac3to can toy with it with minimal changes.ganeshts - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
Thanks! That looks interesting.. Looking forward to it getting integrated with Kodi and LAV Filters..ZeDestructor - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
DTS-HD MA is getting there. The mad boffins behind libav got Dolby TrueHD done sometime in the last 2 years, and now DTS-HD MA is left. Of course, this still requires you to decrypt the BR, but that's another story entirely.slashclee - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
What I really want to know that the review doesn't cover: will Plex on the SHIELD Android TV decode HEVC video or will it still end up streaming a transcoded copy from the Plex server? If it decodes it using the SHIELD hardware, I'm buying one. If not... I might still buy one, eventually, I guess.SleepModezZ - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
Should not that be up to the Plex app? On an Android tablet Plex does often unnecessarily re-encode video. The reason is probably that the included video player is limited in its playback capabilities. It is possible to use some other more advanced video player (like MXPlayer or VLC) so that Plex only hands the video stream to the player and skips the unnecessary re-rencoding.Ask the Plex developers how their app behaves on Android TV.
jeffkibuule - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
Plex has to build a profile that specifies what a device is capable of. Seeing as how they probably didn't have a unit in for testing, it probably won't be enabled just yet.savagemike - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
I would guess they might have a unit for testing. Nvidia gave the Kodi devs a unit or two for testing apparently.jjj - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
The gaming onscreen tests are at 1080p i assume, wish you would have done them at 4k too, seems odd not to.On the power consumption side, data on some more devices would have helped. Maybe you can add some power data and 4k benches, would be helpful.
The price is gonna limit this one, they'll sell 10s of thousands of units per quarter by pricing it at 2x the 99$ max price allowed instead of going 99$ and competing with Chromecast and Apple TV. Hope GRID is just not ready for that kind of scale and that's why they price it not to sell.
Since the storage is extremely limited, especially given the PC ports they advertised at launch, some data on SD card/external storage perf might be useful.
savagemike - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
I think the pricing is kind of reasonable at the moment. You can't buy anything with a processor this capable for $99.Will be interesting to see what Apple does with a next gen Apple TV device though.