Review of the CS918II RK3288 Android TV Box by Gearbest.com (WITH DISCOUNT COUPON)

Lately i had the chance to review some RK3288 devices, one of them is the succesor of the famous CS918 which was powered by the older RK3188 Rockchip processor.

I am talking about the CS918II of course which returned more powerfull than ever before. This time the newer model sports the latest RK3288 processor by Rockchip and it doesn't have the h/w acceleration limitations the previous cpu had. I am talking about xbmc of course because as we all remember to playback 1080p videos needed some work to be done and you couldn't play them out of the box. This is not the case here and everything runs great, back first let's talk about the looks and hardware of the device.

Hardware

The CS918II has a very nice blue colour accompanied with grey and black as well giving it a very stylish appearence

On the side we have 2 USB 2.0 ports along with the MicroSD card slot

Looking at the back we have one more USB 2.0 Ethernet, MicroHDMI, SPDIF Optical Audio Output, MicroUSB OTG, A/V Output, D/C Input and an external wifi antenna

On the front we can see the IR Receiver as well as the built in microphone for voice controls

Here I'm using voice search using the built in microphone

So to sum it up, the ports we get are:

• 3x USB 2.0
• MicroHDMI Output
• MicroUSB OTG
• SPDIF Optical audio output
• Ethernet
• A/V Output
• D/C Input
• IR Receiver
• Microphone
• External WiFi antenna
• MicroSD Card Slot
• On/Off Button

The external antenna gives great wifi signal and it looks a lot like the one Minix Neo X8-H has

Specifications

The CS918II has one great aspect which is RAW POWER. It's main specifications are:

• CPU: Rockchip RK3288 running at 1.8 Ghz max
• GPU: Mali-T764
• RAM: 2GB DDR3
• NAND FLASH: 16GB
• WIFI: 802.11 b/g/n dual band 2.4G/5G
• Bluetooth 4.0
• 4k video playback
• XBMC full H/W Acceleration

Everything runs smooth with no lags and it is based on the stock android experience

Google Earth is a very CPU intensive application and yet the CS918II didn't give me the slightest lag. It ran perfect with no hiccups and due to the great wifi reception, the map loaded quickly too.

Performance

According to the benchmarks i performed on the device you will find out that the performance is excellent

Firstly i ran the very well known and one of the most reliable benchmarks on the play store, the Antutu Benchmark and our device gave us the score of 35687 points which is great

Next test is 3D mark and we got a score of 7207 points.

The final test i made showed us that the CS918II handles a great amount of video files perfect. Here are the results

Video Playback

XBMC also satisfied me because i tried some 1080p high bitrate videos and i got the perfect playback

The first video i tried is 1080p 10Mbps 

And the second one is 1080p 40Mbps

I tried a 4k video file too and there was some frame loss but that may be due to the fact that the videos where loaded from an external USB flash drive

Gaming

Lastly i tried to play some PSP games through an emulator called PPSSPP. To do that i connected an original Dual Shock 2 controller from PS2 using a USB adapter and the CS918II recognized it perfectly which means that it has gamepad drivers preinstalled.

 Tekken 5: Dark Ressurection gave me perfect playback as well as the Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny but Tekken 6 and Gran Turismo didn't give me good results and the playback was slow. This is somewhat normal though because these two games are very intensive and maybe the most intensive PSP games to date.

Tekken 5: Dark Ressurection

Tekken 6

Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny

Gran Turismo

Final Thoughts

 CS918II is a great device and it gives you an excellent experience with no lags or slowdowns, plus you can use it as a gaming console as well because it has native gamepad support and in combination with its powerfull cpu and gpu you can play hundreds of PSP, PSX, android and other console games using emulators.

Pros:

• Native gamepad support
• Raw power
• Lots of ports
• Great video playback including 4k
• Excellent XBMC support
• Perfect wifi reception
• You can use it as a game console too
• Price
• Size
• A/V Output to use it on a non HDMI tv
• Dual band wifi
• IR Remote included

Cons:

• Slightly warm after some hours of usage

As you can see the device is almost perfect and at this price you can't go wrong

You can watch my Unboxing and full review by clicking the links below

Unboxing (English)
Unboxing (Greek)
Review (English)
Review (Greek)

Special thanks to Gearbest and Sunny 

For orders visit the official product page and use this COUPON CODE: GBCSLG to get it at 99.99$

Also visit www.gearbest.com for other great products

Thank you