Review of the Minix X8-H Plus from Gearbest.com, a very high quality Android TV Box

Hello my fellow readers,

In this review i'm going to present you, the latest android tv box from Minix, the Minix Neo X8-H Plus. It is a top quality product as always from this great company.

Looks & Hardware

Physically the is relatively small and thin for a media player. It sports an external wifi antennaand a lot of connectivity ports.

Looking at the top we see the minix logo carved on the device's body.

 At the right side we have

• the power button, 
• an sd card slot, 
• a microphone jack, 
• a micro usb otg 
• and a usb 2.0 port.

On the back we have

• 2 more usb 2.0 ports, 
• the HDMI output,
•  an SPDIF optical audio output, 
• a reset hole, 
• the gigabit ethernet port 
• and the D/C input.

On the right side we find the external wifi antenna, on the front a very dim blue power led

and on the bottom we find the carved android logo and the rubber feet accompanied with a very niceand stylish black textured colour.

Software
Minix has once again incorporated their own home launcher along with the option for the stock android one.

The Minix launcher is very minimalistic and has some great features

On the top left corner, we see our current connectivity setup

Going to the right column, we have the date and time. By pressing it we go to the stock android setting, below we see the file explorers folder, the app drawer, app market folder, and a task killer.

To the left column there are preinstalled folders which include, video players, media players, music players, games, browsers,online streaming, screencasting, and social.

We can also go into the Minix settings and add our favourite apps

In the Minix setings we have 4 tabs.

Network, where we see our wireless and ethernet connections

Display,where we can adjust our hdmi settings, display position and screensaver

Advanced, where we can use the miracast functionand some other useful features

And lastly the Other  tab where we see our device's name, android version and build number

Also we can update our system and go to the stock android settings

If we want a more complex interface, we can always use the stock android launcher

Benchmarks & Specs
I ran Antutu benchmark and got a score of 31289 points which is good for an android tv box

In the device info tab we have

• a Quad Core Amlogic S812 CPU, 
• an Octa Core Mali450 GPU, 
• 2GB DDR3 Ram from which 1.6GB are available for the user, 
• 16GB Nand Flash with 12.48GB available for use and our CPU architecture and speed which is up to 2Ghz

Also our kernel is 1080p.

Next test i did was 3D Mark but it couldn't be completed for unknown reasons

The final test was the Antutu Video Tester to see how the device performs running various video formats and the tests were excellent

Video Playback in XBMC/KODI

I tested some high bitrate videos in XBMC for MINIX, a modified version only for Minix devices which natively supports framerate switching.

The files were on an external Seagate Expansion 2.5" 1 TB HDD without external power supply

The first video i tried was a 1080p 10Mbps file

Next a 1080p 40Mbps

And finally 2 4k videos

I got excellent results from all of them without the slightest frame loss

Gaming & Wifi Reception

Wifi reception is flawless and the Neo X8-H Plus supports wifi 802.11 b/g/n/ac, Dual band 2.4G/5G

and games run perfectly fine using a Dual Shock 4 controller woth the sixaxis app

Conclusion

The Minix Neo X8-H Plus is a perfect media player and a very powerful and capable mini pc. Build quality is excellent as we should expect from a Minix product and the price is very good if you choose to buy it from www.gearbest.com using the DISCOUNT COUPON CODE: X8HPLG

Pros

• Great build quality
• Price (if you choose gearbest)
• Performance
• No heat issues
• Excellent wifi and bluetooth reception
• Generous package
• High quality internals
• Very good support from developers and Minix
• Great amount of ports

Cons

• None

Watch my detailed video unboxing and review

Unboxing in English

Unboxing in Greek

Review in English

Review in Greek