MECOOL M8S PRO, a very small TV box or DDR3 vs DDR4

Strictly speaking, the last time I had an S912-based TV box in my hands was about six months ago. After that, I mostly saw models based on Rockchip SoCs, and even Realtek. But the S912 is still “alive and kicking,” although Rockchip has been noticeably pushing it out of the market lately.
This TV box differs a little from its predecessors, and in this review I’ll try to figure out whether anything has really changed, and in which direction.

But let’s get to the review. First, the device’s specifications.
CPU — Amlogic S912
Number of cores — 8
Graphics — Mali-T820MP3
RAM — 3 GB DDR4 (a 2 GB version is also available)
Flash storage — 16 GB
WiFi: 2.4 / 5 GHz
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 4.0
LAN — 100 Mbit
Ports: 2x USB 2.0, HDMI, RJ45, AV, microSD card
Operating system — Android 7.1
Dimensions — 100 x 100 x 21 mm

The TV box comes in a small white cardboard box.


The package contents are pretty standard and include:
1. TV box
2. Power supply
3. IR remote control
4. HDMI cable
5. Manual


The manual has illustrations and a little text in English. There’s an inexpensive HDMI cable and a 5 V, 2 A power supply with a European plug.


And, of course, a remote control that can be taught a few commands from your TV’s remote.


The power supply has a familiar, though less common, design: power is fed to the board through terminals rather than soldered wires.


The board is very budget-oriented. Similar boards are used in the vast majority of bundled power supplies, though this one has a few nice little differences.


1. First difference: it has an input filter that protects your mains supply from interference generated by the power supply.
The input capacitor has a typical capacitance for this kind of power supply, and a PWM controller IC handles the control.
2. Second difference: there’s also an inductor on the output, which reduces output ripple.


The soldering, though, is so-so.


The first thing that surprised me when I took this TV box out of the box was its size.
For some reason, it looks relatively large in the store photos, but when you pick it up, your first thought is: “Wow, it’s tiny!” :)


I think this photo gives you a rough idea of its size. I know TV boxes are made in “stick” form factors, of course, but those are a completely different category of device.


There are lots of ventilation holes on the front and sides, which I think is definitely a good thing.


On the left are a memory card slot and a pair of USB ports.
On the back are an audio jack combined with an analog video output, a LAN port, an HDMI output, and the power supply jack.


There are also plenty of ventilation holes on the bottom, which helps keep the temperature down.


Before getting to the test results and taking a look at the TV box’s software, I took it apart to inspect the internals.


Undo the four screws, remove the cover, and take a look inside. The WiFi antenna is glued to the top cover and, unlike the usual flexible type, is made from a piece of fiberglass PCB material.


Even though the case is quite small, the board doesn’t fill all the available space. There’s a fairly large empty area along one side. That’s actually a good thing: it allows some airflow, even if not much.
I wouldn’t call the heatsink large. The TV box behaved normally during operation, possibly thanks to the ventilation.


On the part of the board facing the front of the TV box, there is a photodetector and an indicator LED for the operating mode. There is also a spot for a power button, but the button itself is missing.
Unfortunately, the antenna cable is soldered in place, so replacing the antenna will require heating up the soldering iron.


I have no complaints about the assembly quality; everything is neat and clean. There are electrolytic capacitors, though, so the service life is probably limited by their quality.


There is no protection on the HDMI output, so I wouldn't recommend plugging in the cable while the device is powered on. Though I wouldn't recommend doing that under any circumstances—a friend of mine lost an expensive TV that way.


Let's see what the manufacturer installed this time.
1. It really does have DDR4 SDRAM. According to the datasheet, though, these are 4 Gb chips, and since there are four of them, that works out to 2 GB, not the advertised 3 GB. It's actually simple: there are different chips on the underside, rated at 8 Gb (1 GB) each. The table is here.
2. The flash memory is Samsung as well, which is reassuring, if not for its speed then for its reliability.
3. Wi-Fi is handled by an Fn-Link 8223A-SR module. According to the datasheet, it supports two frequency bands and Bluetooth 4.1.
4. Audio DAC; I didn't look up the marking, so this is just a guess.
5. A couple of different voltage regulators, photographed while I was at it.


The underside is less crowded, with a couple of RAM chips and the rest of the small components.


Oh, there's also a reset button tucked away near the front of the board. It lines up with a small hole in the bottom of the case, just big enough for a needle or something similar.


I think many of you are familiar with the TV box interface. I can't say I like it, but I have no major complaints about its functionality. It just looks a bit basic.


I'll talk about the installed apps later, but you can already see that there aren't very many of them.


Android 7.1.1 is preinstalled. I've had this TV box for quite a while, but there have been no updates.


The control panel will be familiar to users of Android 7.x. Its main functions are the same as on other TV boxes and smartphones running this OS.


But you can only open the expanded menu by selecting it specifically. If you simply click the control panel icon, a panel opens on the right with all the necessary settings. It's a matter of taste, of course, but personally, I don't find this very convenient.
Below are three screenshots: the first two show the main menu, and the third shows the CEC settings.


In addition to the resolution and positioning settings, the display settings include two video conversion options: HDR-SDR and SDR-HDR. I used the default settings in my tests and didn't notice any problems.


Since the TV box can output video through an analog video output, it supports 480p, which may be useful for owners of very old TVs.


More than 5 GB of the 16 GB of flash memory is occupied, leaving the user about 10 GB.
The RAM capacity matches the stated 3 GB, though I explained that during the teardown.


CPU-Z data


And here are some test results. As I mentioned above, this TV box has DDR4 memory rather than DDR3, as before, so the tests will mostly compare the performance of TV boxes with DDR3 and DDR4.
For comparison, I chose the MECOOL BB2. It has 2 GB of RAM, but it's one of the most recently tested S912-based TV boxes. I also added the Sunvell T95K Pro to the comparison; it also has DDR3 memory.
The higher score is shown in bold.

As always, AnTuTu kicks off this section.
Version 5.2
Mecool BB2 - 34617, Mecool M8S PRO - 34961, Sunvell T95K Pro - 33492
The lead is small, but it's there.

Version 6.1.3
Mecool BB2 - 36352, Mecool M8S PRO - 38429
The difference is a little more noticeable here.


Version 6.2.1.
Mecool BB2 - 37487, Mecool M8S PRO - 40555, Sunvell T95K Pro - 39825
The difference is almost the same as in the previous test.


Next up is AnTuTu Video. Of course, it's not much of a performance test, but it's still worth checking.
Mecool BB2 - 870, Mecool M8S PRO - 847, Sunvell T95K Pro - 856


Epic Citadel gaming test
High Quality
Mecool BB2 - 54, Mecool M8S PRO - 47.4, Sunvell T95K Pro - 52.2

Ultra High Quality
Mecool BB2 - 31.5, Mecool M8S PRO - 27.8, Sunvell T95K Pro - 25.4

Although the new TV box was faster in AnTuTu, it delivered noticeably lower performance in Epic Citadel.


Like almost all TV boxes based on the S905/912, it has trouble rendering polygons in this test.


I hadn't run this test before, so I'm including it here for reference.


I've been using Geekbench for quite a while, though, so we can compare the results.
Version 3
Mecool BB2 - 624/2331, Mecool M8S PRO - 604/2626, Sunvell T95K Pro - 579/2576

Version 4
Mecool BB2 - 441/1940, Mecool M8S PRO - 441/2176, Sunvell T95K Pro - 432/2101

Compute test
Mecool BB2 - 1440, Mecool M8S PRO - 1344, Sunvell T95K Pro, Sunvell T95K Pro - 1390

Overall, the results are about even: the new one is faster in some tests, the old one in others.



3Dmark
Mecool BB2 - 6186, Mecool M8S PRO - 5230, Sunvell T95K Pro - 5814

PCmark
Mecool BB2 - 3187, Mecool M8S PRO - 3131, Sunvell T95K Pro - 3217

The box with 2 GB of DDR3 memory turned out to be faster.


But I was more interested in the RAM speed test, and it really managed to surprise me—just not in the way I expected.
Copy speed
Mecool BB2 - 3522, Mecool M8S PRO - 2733, Sunvell T95K Pro - 3288

Yes, I have no idea how this happened, but the DDR3 box's speed was noticeably higher than the DDR4 box's.

But that wasn't all: for some reason, the test reported flash memory speed of 710 MB/s. I'll put that down to some rather unusual caching behavior, since the actual speed shown above is 72 MB/s read and 11 MB/s write. The read speed is reasonably good, but the write speed isn't, unfortunately.


Wi-Fi works pretty well overall, though there's one small catch. At home, 2.4 GHz usually works noticeably better than 5 GHz. That's because there's a lot of reinforced concrete between the router and me. But in this case, things turned out completely differently.
The TV box connected to the router at 5 GHz without any problems from the farthest point in my apartment, while it could only pick up the 2.4 GHz network intermittently.


A quick speed test; here's what the lines mean.
1. Gray and lower yellow: 5 GHz at the farthest point, with speeds fluctuating around 2–5 MB/s.
2. White and upper yellow: router on 2.4 GHz, in the same room as the router but as far away as possible.
3. Red: 2 m from the router, 2.4 GHz.
4. The two upper lines: 5 GHz, 2 m from the router.


Here I was just experimenting: I connected the TV box by cable and checked its internet speed. My plan is 50/50, but in practice the upload speed is limited only by the connection speed.


A little about the preinstalled software—fortunately, there isn't much of it.
The TV box software update app never came in handy; there are no updates, as I already mentioned. There is information that the update can be downloaded separately and installed using a USB flash drive.


At first I thought this was a program that was already installed, but it turned out to be an installation package for TV center, which is actually just the well-known Kodi.


The first time I launched it after installation, it asked to update, but I saw no reason to do that and left it “as is.”


Yes, it works and seems to provide access to various media resources, but it all works rather awkwardly—enough to bring to mind that famous photo of Bill Gates.


There’s also the fairly well-known Media center and Miracast software, though personally I don’t really need them.


The most convenient and reliable app is YouTube. There were still a few issues, though: when I tried 1080p at 60 fps, some videos had brief stutters. Otherwise, everything was fine.



1024x768_h265_AC3.mkv (no sound)
2560x1600_AAC .mp4 (brief image stutters)
3840x2160_AAC .mp4 (brief image stutters)
4096x2160_AAC .mp4 (brief image stutters)
gopro-hero-3-be-avc-high@l5.1-4096x2160-12p-aac-2ch.mp4
GraysPeak8HDR_Dolby AC3.mp4 (no sound)
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

Even Sony_4K_HDR_Camp.mp4 played without any problems.

The IXBT test played the same way at different resolutions—or rather, in every test it felt as if the frame rate had dropped from 25 to 22. In other words, the stuttering was cyclical, with the same interval.
Everything else was fine; the video played smoothly and looked good.


Last time, someone “hinted” that it would be a good idea to test it with the “ducks” video. I used to run that test, but nobody seemed to need it, so I stopped.
This time I decided to use it too. The test has three versions:
Ducks.Take.Off.720p.QHD.CRF24.x264-CtrlHD.mkv (20 Mbps)
Ducks.Take.Off.1080p.QHD.CRF25.x264-CtrlHD.mkv (108 Mbps)
Ducks.Take.Off.2160p.QHD.CRF25.x264-CtrlHD.mkv (243 Mbps)

The first two play without problems. The third stutters when played from a USB flash drive. I copied it to internal storage, which helped, but it was clearly right at the limit. My i3 handles the last test even worse, though.


I wanted to test playback of “heavy” files over the network for an extended period, but unfortunately, I ran into a problem.
In fact, this problem has cropped up on every TV box I have. The file manager “sees” the computers but can’t connect to them, showing a message along the lines of “the administrator has denied access.” I tried disabling and re-enabling file sharing and changing the access settings, but it’s one of those “it worked, then suddenly stopped” situations...


I also tested TorrentTV, but I can’t say I liked it. It works, yes, but some HD channels have obvious image freezes while the TV box caches something.

Here’s a brief summary of this small TV box review.
Pros.
Case with ventilation holes
5 GHz WiFi band, with fairly good sensitivity in that range.
The YouTube app works pretty well.
3 GB of RAM

Cons
DDR4 memory turned out to be slower than DDR3 after all
No AC3 support out of the box; you’ll have to use an alternative player.
Some issues with TorrentTV
Flash memory write speed is not very high.

My take: overall, it’s just another TV box. I didn’t notice anything new or particularly distinctive compared with the others. It does have the advertised DDR4 memory, but it turned out to be slower than the DDR3 in another TV box. Overall performance for games and other tasks is no different from similar TV boxes based on the Amlogic S905. I didn’t notice any overheating during video playback, but I wouldn’t say the cooling has much headroom—it’s more or less just enough, with the perforated case helping. The WiFi performance in the 5 GHz band is pretty good. But since that band is still not widely used, you’ll probably have to make do with 2.4 GHz, which performs about as well as on most other TV boxes.
At first I wanted to list the reasonably good power supply as a plus, but decided against it. It’s a decent PSU for a budget device, with input and output filters, but its overall quality doesn’t quite match the price category of this TV box. In my opinion, it's perfectly fine, and there's no need to replace it with another one.

In short, this TV box is pretty average, perhaps because I expected a bit more from it. Still, I wouldn't call it bad, since it works quite reliably overall.

The store provided a discount coupon: GBM8SPRO. With the coupon, the price is $58.88.

That's all. I hope this review was useful and helps you make the right choice.