Beelink i68 TV Box 4K

I was a little late getting around to reviewing this TV box. One thing or another kept coming up, but I finally got to it. At the moment, I'm more interested in mini PCs with the new Cherry Trail Atom and Windows, but I still keep an eye on their closest competitors: Android TV boxes.
So, the usual routine: a look at the outside and inside, a few tests, and some conclusions. If you're interested, come on in :)

I sat down to write this review several times, but somehow it just wouldn't come together. I don't know why—maybe it was a sixth sense, or maybe something else.
Anyway, I've started writing it now. I'm not sure how useful it'll be, since the store is now offering a new version of this box with a gigabit Ethernet connection instead, but I don't think there's a major difference between them, so I'll describe the one I received.

First, a few unboxing photos. They probably won't be all that interesting to most people, so I'll hide them under a spoiler.

The package contents are pretty standard. It includes the bare minimum needed to get connected.
1. TV box
2. Power supply
3. HDMI cable
4. MicroUSB-USB OTG cable
5. Remote control
6. Manual.


The manual is very basic. It briefly explains in English what connects where and describes the initial setup of the box.
The mention of MicroSD in the description of the slots and ports gave me a bit of a laugh, but more on that later.


The remote was a pleasant surprise. To be honest, I'm already a little tired of remotes with 100,500 buttons, so I really liked this minimalist design. It fits nicely in the hand and is easy to use.
It's an IR-only remote, with no radio connection or air mouse function.


The remote has only the bare minimum of buttons:
Power on/off
Home, to return to the desktop
Up/down and left/right buttons.
A cursor button that turns on virtual mouse mode, letting you control the cursor with the buttons listed above.
OK — Enter
A button to open the app list and return to the previous menu.
Volume down/up buttons.

The remote takes two AAA batteries, and the battery cover has an extra latch.


The included HDMI cable and OTG adapter are very basic. They have no ferrite filters, but caused no problems during testing and are perfectly usable.


I liked the included power supply, especially the handy adapter for our type of plug. It's a convenient design, and the connection is solid.
The power supply barely gets warm during operation, which suggests you can connect an external 2.5-inch hard drive without worrying about it.


Well, I finally got around to the box itself—or TV box, whichever you prefer.
At first glance, it’s just a black square box. There’s an I68 label in one corner and IONE in the other (though it’s barely visible).
From the front-left, there are no other identifying marks to tell you what this thing is. Just a neat little black stylish box.
As I’ve mentioned in my reviews before, I really like devices with few buttons, LEDs, and connectors. As they say, beauty is in simplicity.


On the right and rear, though, the manufacturer went all out and crammed in a bunch of connectors.
So, this box has:
Right side
An SD card slot (remember, I mentioned that the manual said microSD). To be honest, this slot surprised me a bit. I can’t remember seeing one on any device I’ve reviewed. It is convenient in its own way: you can use either an SD card or a MicroSD card with an adapter, but it’s unusual, that’s for sure.
Above the memory card slot are two ventilation holes—don’t mistake them for another card slot :) I’m not sure how much they help, but the previous Android boxes had them too. Maybe it’s a tradition?
To the right are a pair of full-size USB ports, mounted vertically. That’s handy in its own way, since you can plug in wide USB devices. The thing is, some USB devices don’t quite meet the standard and won’t fit into horizontally mounted ports.
Tucked inconspicuously next to the full-size ports is a MicroUSB port. You can use it with an adapter to connect standard devices, or to update the firmware by connecting the box to a computer.

Rear panel
There’s a slightly longer list here.
First is the power button (which also turns it off, of course).
Next is the power supply connector. The manufacturer chose a standard 5.5/2.1 mm barrel jack. It’s a great choice for a reliable connection and easy plug replacement, but a poor one for safety, since 12 V power supplies use the same connector.
There’s also a third full-size USB port on the back.
There’s only one way to connect this box to a monitor or TV: with an HDMI cable. There’s no analog output for either audio or video. On the one hand, the manufacturer got rid of a rather archaic connector in the digital age. On the other, you can’t connect speakers via analog, which can sometimes be handy.
Next to the HDMI port is an Ethernet port for connecting to a local network with a cable. A cable is good; a cable is reliable. Even if Wi-Fi goes down, the cable will keep working.
To the right is another rather archaic connector, S/PDIF, for sending audio to a receiver.
And last on the list is a small, unassuming hole with a Reset button behind it (because of course there is one).


The front panel plastic is slightly transparent. Behind it are the remote control’s IR receiver and a status LED.
When power is connected to the box, the LED is off. When it’s on, the LED is blue; in sleep mode (press the power button on the remote), it’s red. But the red light is so dim that I couldn’t get a decent photo of it. That’s actually a good thing—it won’t be annoying at night.


The bottom is flat, with four rubber feet that slide a little on a smooth table.
There are also ventilation holes on the bottom, but they seem too small to me.


After inspecting the outside, I decided to take a look inside. But just in case, I first checked whether the box worked—wouldn’t want any surprises :)
Yep, everything works. Android booted up, so I could safely turn it off and take it apart.


The first obstacle was the rubber feet. They’d been glued on really well.
I even nicked one a little while removing it (the knife slipped slightly).


Once I’d dealt with the feet, I moved on to the clips. The case is held together not just with screws, but with a whole bunch of clips too.
The front and side clips came apart without any trouble, but the rear ones broke. The seam between the top and bottom is uneven at the back, which made it awkward to open.
But the two broken clips didn’t affect the case’s sturdiness at all once it was reassembled. In my opinion, the screws alone would have been enough.


At first glance, the internals reminded me a lot of the MXIII.
Though “reminded” isn’t quite right: some of the components are identical to those in the MXIII. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; one thing at a time.
Everything looks neat. There’s a heatsink for cooling the processor, and a large SD card slot is clearly visible.


The board is secured with several small self-tapping screws. Let’s remove those too.


There’s a fairly substantial metal plate on the bottom of the case. It’s clearly not just some random piece of metal, but a stamped part made specifically for this case—the case even has mounting points for it.
But all of the above looks a little odd, since the thermal pad that transfers heat from the underside of the circuit board (or, more precisely, from the bottom of the processor) to the metal only makes contact over a small part of its surface.
It feels as if the processor was originally supposed to sit closer to the front of the box, but then the developers changed their minds and moved it back, so it no longer lines up with the plate.
In practice, I didn’t find any overheating during the tests, but it still leaves a bad aftertaste: they could have done better simply by shifting the plate.


Only passive components—resistors and capacitors—are mounted on the underside of the circuit board.
There’s also a sticker with the board’s serial number and a note that it has 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of flash memory. And the model information: RK68B. Just a little more and it would have been the RK86 :)
That name is very similar to the Tronsmart Orion R68, but its board is noticeably different; at the very least, the RAM chips have been moved to the underside of the board.


The rear side, now with the back cover removed. On the right you can see the reset button, hidden behind a small hole. On previous TV boxes, it was behind the 3.5 mm audio jack, but since there isn’t one here, the button has been placed separately.


Let’s take a closer look at the electronics used in this version of the TV box.
Most of the components and circuit blocks are the same as in previous models, but there are a few differences, which I’ll cover below.
1. Wi-Fi is built around the AP6330 module, which should already be familiar to readers.
According to the datasheet, its full name is WiFi+Bluetooth 4.0(HS)+FM Rx, and it can operate at 2.4 and 5.0 GHz. But since I don’t have any 5 GHz access points nearby, I’ll just have to take the manufacturer’s word for it.
2. It uses a printed antenna. This is yet another time I’ve noticed that the box’s model number is often printed on the antenna. I suspect they’re designed specifically for each case model and Wi-Fi module.
I didn’t run any tests with numerical results, since I’m used to judging things relative to something else. But I can say that this box’s Wi-Fi sensitivity is lower than the MXIII-G’s. Not by a huge margin, but noticeably. At my desk, with several concrete walls in between (at least one load-bearing wall and two interior walls), the connection was barely usable.
3. I don’t recognize this chip, and I couldn’t find any information about it online. Someone on one of the foreign forums also hit a dead end trying to identify it.
Functionally, it’s a controller for a wired Ethernet connection, apparently 100 Mbps.
I was later told that it’s a Texas Instruments DP83848 Single Port 10/100 Mb/s Ethernet Transceiver
4. This time, the manufacturer didn’t use a dedicated multi-channel power controller, opting instead for a bunch of smaller ones. The photo shows what is presumably the processor and memory power supply section.


1, 2. More chips responsible for keeping the box properly powered. As far as I could make out, this also has the overvoltage protection found in the MXIII, with a few extra components added. This is protection against accidentally connecting a 12 V power supply instead of 5 V.
3, 4. Flash memory and RAM—the same chips from the same manufacturers as in the MXIII. I assume it’s cheaper for the manufacturer to use the same internals across all its devices.


1. I found another new chip on the board: a dedicated real-time clock, AT8563. Unfortunately, it has no battery inside, so the time resets when the power is turned off :( I even found what this timer was presumably copied from, PCF8563. It wasn't originally designed to be connected to a battery, but according to the datasheet, the chip draws very little current in standby, so it might be possible to power it independently.
2. This “fellow” is already familiar from a bunch of TV boxes, including ones running different operating systems. It's a basic four-port USB hub. By the way, there's a spot on the board for a USB device, and the hub's contacts are routed there too, so it should be fairly easy to add a fourth USB port.


I also took a look at the processor under the heatsink, which was covered in a layer of thermal paste too :)


This TV box uses a Rockchip RK3368 processor. The name roughly translates as “stone chip”—and a “rock” is a “rock,” after all :)))


All right, let's put the heatsink back after applying some fresh thermal paste, put everything back together, and move on to testing the installed software.


On startup, this is the “desktop” I got. Just a reminder: we're dealing with Android 5.1.
I'd say it looks rather bare-bones.


Quite a few apps are preinstalled on the TV box. Some of them could easily have been left out, but that's what we got.
The main ones are Kodi and YouTube; I see the rest as extras.


A little about the settings menu: it's been noticeably redesigned since earlier Android versions.
The basics are still the same, of course, but it's more convenient to use (at least in my opinion). More specifically, navigation is easier, especially with the remote.
There are quite a lot of screenshots, so I'll hide them under a spoiler.

The first thing that caught my eye was the black border around the image, even though the monitor said everything was fine: 1920x1080.
I’d seen this many years ago when setting up an analog TV connection to a video card output, but the problem was eventually fixed, and I forgot about it for years.
The border was there in every mode, whether playing a video, viewing an open app, or just looking at the desktop.


To check what I was actually getting at the output, I ran a Full HD video output test and, of course, got exactly what I expected.
The settings were set to 1920x1080, but the image was fitted into a smaller screen, so pixel-perfect output was out of the question.


While poking around the settings menus, I’d noticed an option to manually fit the image to the screen. Since I had no other options (trying different resolutions didn’t help, so I’d switched it to Auto), I decided to give it a try.
A red rectangle is visible around the edges. Using the horizontal and vertical size buttons, I expanded the image until the red rectangle lined up with the edges of the monitor screen.
It’s worth noting that the adjustment is pretty coarse. I was afraid I’d have to go through a ton of iterations to get the result I wanted, but in reality it took just three steps up vertically and three horizontally.


When I ran the test again, everything was perfect: the image was displayed pixel for pixel.
I don’t understand why the image didn’t initially fill the screen. I could understand it if the image were being output through an analog connection, but with a digital signal, it should be possible to output a fixed resolution matching the monitor’s native resolution. It is the 21st century, after all.


Before moving on to the tests, I first had to install the necessary apps. I installed them using the built-in file manager.
I was a little surprised to see a SATA option, even though it was inactive. I assume the software is universal and there may be versions with a hard drive.
The screenshot shows a connection to one of my home computers. I connected and was able to work with the files with almost no effort—just selected my computer’s IP address. Nice :)


Now we can move on to the tests.
I originally planned to include some gaming tests, but things turned out a little differently, and there was no need for them. If you’re interested in gaming performance specifically, let me know what you’d like me to test. I’ll download it and give it a try.

I decided to start by getting more detailed information about what we’d be testing. For this, I used the well-known CPU-Z program.
The program showed that the box has an eight-core processor. I also got to see the CPU frequency adjustment in action. As I understand it, the frequency isn’t changed for the entire processor at once or separately for each core; instead, it’s selected for a group of four cores.




A little more detailed information from CPU-Z.
Unfortunately, the box doesn’t have full ROOT access, at least according to CPU-Z, and I’m inclined to believe it. But installing various apps didn’t cause any problems.

Once again, the program reports a resolution of 1920x1008 rather than 1920x1080. Apparently, it subtracts the 72 pixels taken up by Android’s bottom bar somehow, even though there is no such bar in version 5.1. The resolution shown below, 1280x672dp, is not an interpolation value; it’s the resolution expressed in different units.
In any case, I’ve already shown above that the image is correctly output at 1920x1080, so we’ll let the program off the hook :)


Besides the rather unusual resolution information, the next tab showed information about a battery that isn’t even there. The box thinks the battery voltage is 3 mV, that it’s 50% charged, and that its condition is normal. Hilarious :)
And a temperature of 2.6 degrees is just great. No, it’s warmer than that in my house :))))


I finally got around to testing it. I decided to start with a test I hadn't seen in any other reviews of this box. I don't know why, but there it is.
Since boxes like this are used mostly for gaming or multimedia, I decided to check how well it supports various video formats.
I used AnTuTu Video Tester 3.0 for the test.


What I found here was less disappointing than surprising. The box produced some very strange results. The box from my previous review played every video format, but this one did much worse: only 22 formats passed the test, 2 passed partially, and 6 failed completely.


Just in case, I took screenshots of the program's detailed report on video file playback.

After the video tests, I moved on to performance testing with synthetic benchmarks.
I started with AnTuTu version 5.1.
The test was run before I updated the app, so the model




Then I remembered someone had asked me to run a test with real rabbits—or, more simply, AnTuTu X. But no matter what I tried, I couldn't get the app to run.
Well, it installed and launched, but immediately asked for an update. It wouldn't work without one, and after updating it was already version 5.7 :(
I ran a couple of tests (that's how it worked out while updating): one with version 5.7 and another with 5.7.1. All three results were different (the first test was with 5.1).
5.1, with no box information — 34164
5.7 — 37977
5.7.1 — 36119
I can't say which result is the correct one, but I can say I was a bit disappointed. The previous MXIII-G scored 41842 in 5.7, even though the i68 was originally marketed as the more powerful model.




Next was the 3DMark test: 5096, compared with 8053 for the MXIII-G.




After that, I ran a synthetic benchmark measuring performance across various applications.
This was the only test where the i68 beat the MXIII-G: 3983 for the i68 and 2937 for the MXIII-G.




The results really surprised and disappointed me. I expected it to outperform the MXIII-G. Why the i68 did better in the last test is still a mystery, since when I ran it, I expected the result to be in line with the previous tests.
Of course, you could put the results down to the MXIII-G running Android 4.4 and the i68 running 5.1, but why such a big difference?

For demonstration purposes, I recorded a video (sorry about the handheld footage) of a segment from the 4K test video. The clip played perfectly on my MXIII-G; it was played from a flash drive at a 100 Mbps bitrate.


After these tests, I decided not to run any gaming tests and just stick with what I had.
I don't see much point in describing the stock apps, since everyone probably knows Kodi by now and I wouldn't have anything new to say. Still, I installed the app I was interested in: Torrent TV.


I didn't run into any problems here; everything worked perfectly. I was using a wired internet connection, though.


Since I ran into some performance issues, the manager I work with suggested the latest firmware, which I installed. I uploaded it to Yandex Disk; the firmware version is I68_102L1101.

The test results are under the spoiler.

So, what can I say?
I had no real complaints about the hardware or the appearance; both were excellent.
The remote is convenient, the design is neat, and the board is well made. In general, I've never had much to complain about with Beelink's build quality.

But the software left me with the opposite impression.
I still can't figure out how the MXIII-G turned out better than the I68 despite costing less.
The only thing I can blame is Android 5, compared with Android 4 on the MXIII. Of course, I can't rule out hardware issues completely, but there was no overheating, and almost all the components are the same as in the MXIII (apart from the processor, obviously).
What I find even harder to understand is the stuttering when playing 4K video. It's not that I care much about it—I don't even have anything to watch 4K on—but it's still strange.

I have high hopes that all of this has been fixed in the gigabit version of this TV box. Sorry I didn't manage to write this review sooner :(

Since this TV box is no longer for sale, the store link leads to a page with other Beelink TV box models.

I hope the review is still useful, if only for the new firmware version.

The product was provided by the store for review.