Today we’re taking a look at the alpha why’s a8 Android TV box. Alfawise a8 tv box android 9.0This is a very budget choice but still a very good choice. It is one of your cheaper options but it also has everything you need. And in my opinion, is much better than something like a fire stick. But we’ll start off with unboxing being a budget product. This doesn’t have very exciting packaging if you open it up all we get inside here is the box itself.

We get a power cable the remote control an HDMI cable as well as the instruction manual. Now first of all if we look at the box it’s got rubber feet on the bottom. So it will stay nice and secure it’s a very basic-looking box. But I wouldn’t say it’s bad. It’s got a normal sort of Android box look to it made of plastic as all. Android boxes Are but it’s just gonna sit by your TV switch shouldn’t cause a problem.

Now on the back, we’ve got the power input. Your Ethernet input HDMI input you’ve also got AV s/dive as well as one USB port. Now that’s not the only USB port on this device. If we turn it over we’ve actually got three USB ports as well as an SD card slot. So this is something that surprised me with this. You get that many ports and that’s one thing that other boxes are quite often short of. And that’s USB ports now.

This box power by the rock chip rk3288. Two gigs of ram and 16 gigs of internal memory now the pros. And the cons of this it only supports two-point four gigs Wi-Fi. So it doesn’t support the 5 gigahertz band. On top of that, it’s got 100 megabits per second Ethernet. So if your connection is something like 200 megabits per second. You’re only going to be able to get a hundred out of this now.

A lot of people are below that so they won’t even notice the difference. And 100 is still plenty for streaming. Now another thing this comes with Android 8.1 Oreos straight out of the box. So that’s gonna be good for. A lot of people were very future-proofed and your applications are gonna work.

And of course it supports all of the usual playback formats including 3d and 4k. But another downside it does not have Bluetooth. So first things first we’ll see how much of these 16 gigs of internal memory that we do actually get. So we just go down we’ll go to storage. And reset internal storage and you can see there’s a little bit used but we still get 12 gigabytes available.

And for those of you just using this is a streaming media center. But not storing files isn’t gonna cause you a problem at all. Twelve gigabytes is perfectly acceptable. so the firmware itself is quite simple looking it’s pretty similar to every other Android media center. It’s got all of the shortcut applications there and you can add your own at the bottom you simply click on the plus icon and you then just press on any applications that you want to add.

https://youtu.be/6J4oWfMF5-8

They’ll then move into your quick launch bar. So if I then press back you’ll see they all appear down the bar. At the bottom, Ella can then access them from there. Alfawise a8 tv box android 9.0 in terms of media playback I tried 4k at 60 frames a second. now this was actually stuttering a lot it looked more like 20 frames a second. and the audio was very out of sync. I then tried at 4k at 30 frames a second and it played perfectly smooth. just as I would expect.

And of course, 1080p and below played perfectly fine. Alfawise a8 tv box android 9.0 so to use this for video playback up to 4k at 30 frames a second it’s still going to be suitable. I then decided to try a bit of gaming on this device I tried it beach buggy racing. now this played pretty much fine it was perfectly playable and enjoyable. there was the odd bit of starter however but I didn’t find it took away from the game too much. I then decided to try Riptide gp2.

Again it was perfectly playable I’d say there was probably a little bit more stuttering this time. but the game still ran ok. finally, I decided to try Real Racing 3 and this was in fact unplayable totally. there was so much stutter so much lag the frame rate was dropped so low. I found it really hard to steer. but I then decided to go over to emulate and see how it performed there I tried Sonic and Knuckles on the Mega Drive and again it played okay.

But it did seem that playback was slightly slower than it should have been and I then moved on to the Nintendo 64. where it didn’t play very well at all. again there was so much frame loss it just wasn’t playable. I then decided to head over to YouTube and do some YouTube testing YouTube it was able to play up to 4k resolution and work perfectly fine. so for those of you that do a lot of YouTubing, this device is also gonna work for that.

I also did a bit of browsing in Google Chrome and again it worked perfectly fine. As you scroll through the page the load speeds weren’t the fastest but it’s still loaded in an acceptable time. and wouldn’t be too much hassle to browse the web this way. I also decided to check DRM for those of you that use things such as Netflix DRM is required. Alfawise a8 tv box android 9.0 so if we go into DRM info you’ll see as expected this is wide vine level 3.

So this means for those of you that do use Netflix you won’t be able to get those full HD resolutions. but of course, that’s only apps like Netflix it’s not gonna cause a problem for your other media players. and in terms of settings and everything, it’s the standard Android settings. so everything should be similar there but. I think that pretty much covers this device. it’s a budget option for those of you that don’t want something like a fire stick that’s a pain. but you also don’t want to spend money as all you’re doing is streaming. It’s currently on gear best for $27.99 of weeks.