A Beast of a Box for a Beauty of a Price - The Memobox MX Max

This replaced my Nvidia Shield TV and I’ve never been happier with a purchase. Read on…

So I’ve spent the last year living with an Nvidia Shield TV 16gb. It’s a hell of a box and does whatever I wanted it to, but I discovered I was really just using it for Kodi and to play some casual Android games like Asphalt 8 and Riptide GP 2. I decided I really just needed an Android box that would do the same things and I could sell the Shield and come out ahead.

This MX Max is the sweetest little box I’ve ever seen for the money. It does everything the Shield did and more. It runs Kodi like a dream, even heavier builds. It plays all my Android games every bit as well as the shield did and even runs the emulators I was using (up to and including Reicast, the Dreamcast emulator) with no effort at all. The only thing it can’t do that the Shield could was display Netflix and Hulu in 1080p. Special certification is needed for this and none of these Chinese TV boxes have it, so these two programs are limited to 480p. The trade-off though, is that you get full access to the Google Play store, not the truncated access you get from devices running Android TV, like the Shield and the Nexus Player.

The Memobox MX Max rocks the latest S905 Amlogic system on a chip paired with a Mali 450 graphics processor and 2gb of DDR3 RAM. It has 16gb of on-board storage. It can output 4K and passes Dolby Digital and DTS via HDMI. It took my 32gb sd card, a 32gb USB drive and a Terabyte hard drive, all without a hitch. The Shield is sold and I’ve never looked back. This little thing doesn’t benchmark like a high spec box like the Shield, but in the real world, I can’t see that much difference in performance. Don’t get me wrong. If you have money to burn and don’t have another hi-def source for Netflix, then the Shield is a great purchase. But if you want to spend a third the price and getcomparable real world performance, this is the Android box that can get it done.