Have we hit a new low for Android TV box prices?
The new MXQ 4K RK3229 Android TV box is available at Geekbuying for under $30.
No that’s not a typo.
This is the lowest price I’ve ever seen for a brand new Android TV box. Especially one that claims to have 4K 10bit @ 60 frames per second.
That price doesn’t get you Android 5.1, unfortunately. The MXQ 4K runs Android 4.4 KitKat. It will, however, get you a Release Candidate of Kodi 16.
The RK3229 is a quad-core CPU, based on the Cortex-A7 design and is paired with the Mali-400 GPU. It was announced at this year’s CES in Las Vegas.
In terms of hardware, the MXQ has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of eMMC flash storage. It comes with the usual assortment of ports: 4 USB ports, analog microphone and speaker outputs, HDMI and wired 100 Mbps Ethernet. Wireless 802.11 b\g\n is also included.
According to CNX-Software, Geekbuying is reporting an AnTuTu score of 21134. which isn’t too bad considering the cost. That puts it on par with some of the older RK3188 devices like the Ugoos UT2, and ahead of the Zidoo X1 that I reviewed a few months ago.
I’ll be interested to see how well the MXQ 4K RK3229 TV box performs in a real-world test. Although, to be honest, even if 4K video quality isn’t stellar, being able to get a TV box at this price point is going to appeal to a lot of people.
Check out the specs below, or head on over to GeekBuying if you want to get one for yourself.
MXQ 4K RK3229 Specs
- Android 4.4
- H.264/H.265 10Bit Hardware decoding
- Rockchip RK3229 Quad core Up to 1.5GHz
- Mali-400MP
- OpenGL ES 2.0
- DDRIII 1GB
- Nand Flash 8GB
- 2.4G WiFi, 10/100 BaseT
- HDMI 2K*4K
- KODI \DLNA \ AirPlay \ Google TV Remote \ LAN \ Miracast \ 3D moive support
Wow! Thank you. You have become my official hero. Thanks for this post.
Isn’t the RK3229 also supposed to be able to play back h264 Hi10p files? Not even the nvidia shield tv is able to do it properly… maybe through software decoding, but it may stutter.
The problem is that this is Rockchip, so poor after sales support, no updates (still 4.4? Seriously?), no support in the Kodi community.
Anyone ordered one and at least received a shipping notification yet?
I ordered one, but it is still in ‘processing’ stage…
Received mine yesterday, had only a few hours to play with it, so I can’t comment on its stability just yet.
Kodi comes with all sorts of plugins preinstalled, takes about 5 minutes to update them all. Things I tried (playback of HD materials of all kinds) work well, haven’t noticed any lag in UI graphics. Other than that (and a IR remote adjusted launcher), it’s a standard kitkat thingie. It is nifty though
Can it run video from the USB port via a pen drive? If so what codecs does it support?