YUNDOO Y8, a powerful TV box

This review won't be very long, so I'll get straight to the specifications:
CPU — RK3399
Cores — 2 (ARM Cortex-A72 at 2.0 GHz) + 4 (ARM Cortex-A53)
Graphics — ARM Mali-T864 GPU
RAM — 4 GB
Flash storage — 32 GB
Wi-Fi: 2.4/5 GHz
Bluetooth — BT 4.1 + EDR
LAN — 1000 Mb Ethernet
Ports: 2x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 3.0 Type-C, S/PDIF, HDMI, RJ45, SD (128 GB)
Video output — HDMI 2.0
Video codec — 4K2K 10-bit H.265
Operating system — Android 6.0
Dimensions — 116x115x23 mm

This TV box is also available in a more modest configuration, with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of flash storage. By and large, I don't see much difference between the 2 GB and 4 GB RAM versions at the moment, so the latter is more of a future-proofing measure than a necessity right now.

TV box with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB flash storage — link, price $93, or $90 with the coupon
TV box with 4 GB RAM and 32 GB flash storage — link, price $119, or $109 with the coupon.

Everything comes in a neat, sturdy box, with a brief list of the device's specifications printed on the side.


Everything is packed neatly, and the TV box itself is secured around the edges with foam.


The package is pretty standard for devices of this type and includes:
1. TV box
2. Power supply
3. HDMI cable
4. IR remote control
5. Manual and a mysterious card.


A closer look at the contents.
1. This is probably the simplest TV box manual I've ever come across. It only lists the ports, and even that information is incomplete.
2. The HDMI cable is a little thicker than usual, but otherwise it's just a cable.
3, 4. A 5 V, 2.5 A power supply with a European plug. I didn't open it, but after all the tests I can say it barely gets warm in use, and it seems like a perfectly decent power supply.


The remote's design is a little different from the ones I've seen before, with a slightly different button layout and a faux-leather texture on the casing. The remote can be partially programmed, meaning you can teach it a few commands from any other remote. In this case, there are five commands: volume up and down, mute, and turning the TV on and switching its video input. Of course, you can assign any other commands to these buttons. The instructions for programming it are on the back of the remote, though they're in English.


The manufacturer also decided to do something different with the TV box's appearance, giving it a somewhat unconventional design. It's not a colorful case like one I reviewed some time ago, but it still has its own distinctive look. At least it's original, though I would have preferred a regular flat box.


Compared with other TV boxes, it's probably a little larger than average. That said, this device isn't meant to be portable, so size doesn't really matter. And personally, I think bigger is better.


There's a power button on the front. When power is connected, the TV box doesn't start automatically; it stays in standby mode.


The high-speed interfaces are on the left side. Here, that means not only USB 3.0 but also Type-C. Though why this device needs Type-C remains a mystery to me.
There's also an SD card slot on the left.


Most of the ports are where you'd expect them, on the back:
Power connector
S/PDIF output
A port marked with the letter R, which isn't mentioned in the manual.
Ethernet port
HDMI video output
Two USB 2.0 ports.

There are also several ventilation holes on the back.
I mentioned above that there's an unexplained 3.5 mm port. The RK3399 doesn't have its own audio codec, but the RK3299 does, so the port was probably included as a provision for expanding the product line.


There are plenty of ventilation holes on the bottom too, along with four soft rubber feet. The TV box doesn't slide around on the table.


As soon as you turn it on, the TV box gets its first criticism. In standby mode, the red light on the panel is barely visible, but when the box is on, it turns into a seriously eye-searing blue beacon. I recommend covering it up right away with something.


I didn't waste much time before opening it up. It turned out that although the screws are conventionally hidden under the rubber feet, there are three of them, not four as I expected.


There was nothing interesting on the underside of the board: just a few components and a label with the markings.


I remove four more screws and take out the board. There's more to see here.


First, the TV box has two antennas, not one. They're located at the front and top of the box.
There's also a metal plate. Judging by the thermal pad, some of the heat is transferred to it. But since the pad is quite thick, I have serious doubts about how effective this solution is.


Everything is assembled very neatly. The heatsink and connectors take up a fairly large area of the board.



The heatsink isn't very tall, about 6 mm. Its fins are thick and closely spaced, which in this case helps transfer heat to the metal plate on top.


The heatsink is held in place by two spring-loaded plastic clips, which provide a pretty good fit.
But I'm not happy to see another fairly thick thermal pad between the processor and heatsink. I'd replace it with something thinner, but first I'd need to check that it wouldn't interfere with the other components.


Without the heatsink, the board looks more densely populated, since some of the components were underneath it.
I'm so used to processors having a small black package that when I saw the promotional images of this SoC, I thought it was just another marketing trick.
But after removing the heatsink, I was a little surprised: the processor really does have a metal lid and is quite substantial in size.


Let's take a look at the components installed on the board.
1. The SoC itself: an RK3399 from RockChip.
2. 4 GB of DDR3 RAM, implemented using four SKhynix chips.
3. 32 GB of flash memory made by Samsung. Finally! I'm getting tired of those slow Foresee chips.
4. An RK808 multichannel controller, also made by RockChip, which makes sense.
5. Network connectivity is handled by two chips. One is a new-to-me gigabit ZX2AA500, which, judging by its markings and the descriptions I found, is a Chinese design.
6. There's also an AP6356S Wi-Fi module. The same chip is used in the Vorke Z3 equivalent with an RK3399 processor.


1. An unidentified chip near the power connector.
2. Some kind of PWM controller near the front-panel connector.
3. Presumably a power controller for the USB ports.
4. A pair of PWM controllers near the flash memory.


There's a reset button behind the 3.5 mm jack. It's funny that I usually mention it in my reviews, but I can't remember ever actually using one.


The USB 2.0 ports are protected too, but near the HDMI connector I found only an empty footprint for the protection component. That's an oversight.


That's it: I've inspected the outside and the inside. Time to move on to the software.

The first thing I noticed was the boot speed. It takes just 7 seconds from power-on to the desktop! I've never seen a TV box boot this quickly before.
And that's not even mentioning how quickly apps install.


Besides the actual "desktop," there are four more screens where you can add your chosen apps and open the settings menu. The Russian translation is a bit awkward in places, though.


The last screen displays information about the TV box, lets you choose a theme, and lets you turn off the sound that confirms your selections. Actually, the Russian version says “Enable touch sound,” and I only figured out what the setting really does after reading the original English version :)


There aren't many apps installed, but I think that's actually a good thing.


The settings menu uses the same “tile” style, although I personally don't find it very convenient. I'm used to the regular (in this case, expanded) view.


Although there aren't many preinstalled apps, they still take up almost 2.5 GB of the 27 GB of flash storage available to the user.
Of the 4 GB of RAM, only 3.8 GB is available too. As far as I understand, some of it is allocated to the graphics card.


Strangely enough, there are very few settings for the HDMI output. There's a “zoom” option, which I didn't need.


There's also a resolution selector. Interestingly, I only saw this version of the menu a few times. There was also a menu with a bunch of 1920x1080 output options (with frame rates from 24 to 60), but no higher resolutions. This may be because, as an experiment, the TV box was connected through a capture device and an HDMI-to-VGA converter.


It doesn't want to update, though an update wouldn't hurt.


CPU-Z shows the processor running at up to 1.5 GHz, although as far as I know, that's the clock speed of the “little brother” of the model under review (I almost said “suspect”), the Rockchip RK3229 SoC. The RK3399 should run at 2.0 GHz.


A little more information from AIDA64.


And now we get to the tests. The announcements for this processor tout its high performance, so I was curious to see for myself.
AnTuTu version 5 scored 52,000 points, but there was no confirmation of the result, even though the internet connection was active.


The promotional material claimed performance of around 75,000 points. AnTuTu version 6 scores even higher: 77,000, which is pretty good in my opinion. I think it should be perfectly comfortable for gaming. For comparison, the Amlogic 912 scores about half as much.


As usual, Geekbench's computational performance tests were run in versions 3 and 4.
Comparative testing.
S905X____S912___Realtek 1295___RK3399
629_____624_____586______1480
1852____2331____1983_____3481
594_____441_____515______1404
1673____1940____1542_____2572
877_____1440____806______1983

You could say the RK3399 "wiped the floor" with the others in every test, and by a clear margin. The only one that can put up any kind of competition so far is Intel's Atom. At least among the devices I've tested.


The 3DMark score fell just short of 10,000, but I didn't get such a high result in PCMark—around 4,250.


The well-known Epic Citadel test seems to have hit its own internal limits, since the results at High Quality and Ultra High are practically identical. As far as I know, the maximum possible result is 60 fps.


I used to run this test just to collect statistics. Now I can compare it at least with the Beelink based on the Realtek 1295: it scored 1,907 (27.2), while this one scored 3,973 (56.7)—twice as much.


The RAM and flash speeds were a little surprising.
On the plus side, the RAM reached almost 10 GB/s, which is very good and about twice the speed of the TV boxes I tested earlier.
The internal flash memory is also pretty fast: 140 MB/s read and 50 MB/s write. That’s thanks to the Samsung chip rather than Foresee.

But performance with external interfaces was a little disappointing: 32/24, even though a fairly fast flash drive was connected via a USB 3.0 card reader.


Multimedia—well, this is where the new Rockchip really shines. To start with, it passed the AnTuTu Video test in full, which is extremely rare. As far as I can remember, only one TV box has managed that.


I also did my usual check for pixel-perfect output. The image was initially smaller than the screen, so it looked like this in all the players.


I went into the display settings and stretched the image to the edges of the screen. It immediately looked right in all the players.


Playback was tested with various video formats.

1024x768_h265_AC3.mkv
2560x1600_AAC .mp4 (I didn't notice any particular problems)
3840x2160_AAC .mp4 (brief image freezes)
4096x2160_AAC .mp4 (brief image freezes)
gopro-hero-3-be-avc-high@l5.1-4096x2160-12p-aac-2ch.mp4
GraysPeak8HDR_Dolby AC3.mp4
LG 4K Paris_AAC.mp4
LG 4K Story-of-Earth_AAC.mp4
LG_Chess_HDR.mp4
Philips_UHD_supershopdemo_1.mp4
samsung-note-3-3840x2160-high@l5.1-AAC-2ch-2.mp4

4K HD.Club Changhong-Furano-100mbps.mp4

The only problem was playing the test video from the IXBT website; all the other videos played smoothly.


I also tested the fairly demanding Sony_4K_HDR_Camp.mp4 file, and it played smoothly and looked great.
The screenshots are included to show what I'm talking about, since the box itself can't take a screenshot of the video window.


TUMC, an alternative to KODI, is installed instead.


At first I spent a long time figuring out the plugins. I installed one, but it absolutely refused to play videos. Eventually I got the hang of it and added quite a few channels.


The K-addons program helped with installing plugins.


There are quite a lot of channels covering different topics.


But it's easier to select All right at the start and install them all :)


So far I've only talked about the good things about this TV box, but there's a downside too.
First, Wi-Fi. I have no complaints about its sensitivity: it picked up my access point from across the apartment. But it struggled to connect, and the speed was very low. The test also showed that the box takes a very long time to find nearby access points.


In the end, I had to get another router off the shelf and test with that.
The results on the left are from the opposite corner of the room; on the right, from about a meter away. Frequency: 2.4 GHz.


For the 5 GHz test, I had to move the TV box closer to my main router, about 2.5 meters away, with a small obstruction from the corner of a wall. I got around 200 Mbps, which is pretty good.


But during testing, I ran into some issues with the wired interface. When connected to my main router, it takes a very long time to connect, and often fails to connect at all. But if I unplug and reconnect the cable, it eventually connects, and there are no further connection problems until the next reboot. Even entering the settings manually doesn't help.


When testing the speed with a direct connection to the computer, I entered all the settings manually and it connected instantly. Then, after the test, I connected the TV box to my main router (which it hadn't wanted to connect to) and enabled DHCP, and it connected without any problems.
I don't know what to blame yet—the Chinese Ethernet controller or my router—but the connection can be unstable.


With a wired connection, I got speeds of around 600–800 Mbps. I don't know why this device needs so much, but the result is pretty good.


As an addition to the review, I recorded this little virtual "tour". You might find it interesting.


That's it. I'll try to sum things up.
Pros
High performance
Neat appearance
Four USB ports, one of them USB 3.0 and one USB 3.0 Type-C
Gigabit Ethernet
5 GHz band support
Fast RAM and flash storage
Virtually no problems playing video
AC3 support
4 GB RAM and 32 GB flash storage
Power button
A fairly convenient remote control with five programmable buttons

Cons
Wired network connections may cause problems
The front-panel LED is too bright
And, perhaps, the price.

My take: the new processor doesn't disappoint. Performance is genuinely high; next to it, the Amlogic 912 seems like a turtle, never mind the 905 and so on. You can see this not just in benchmark scores, but in everyday use too—it feels like things happen before you even select them :) The video format support is also impressive. I only ran into trouble playing the IXBT test clip; otherwise, the box played everything I threw at it. The same goes for AC3 audio playback, which is not often the case.

Unfortunately, there were some problems too. One is its odd behavior with certain router models. I assume this will be fixed in an update (if there are any).

Otherwise, in my opinion, this TV box is a success. While I still have it, I'll be happy to run some additional tests.

There's currently a flash sale. Prices aren't much different from the regular ones, but I found a couple of coupons on a forum: GBYDY8 for the model reviewed, bringing the price to $109.99, and GBYDY816 for the model with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB flash storage, bringing it to $90.99. After testing them, I can say that I'd buy the second option now.