Having an N2 I can say it’s really nice, worth the extra expense. The Odroid-N2 is really well made and well engineered. It has gigabit ethernet already so that offsets the higher cost a bit. The S922X is a pretty remarkable chipset, about half again as fast as the S912 and over twice the speed of the S905X.
The S922X actually about x2 faster than a S912, in both single threaded and multi threaded loads.
That’s just according to a benchmark.
But it feels many times smoother than a S905X/S912 device.
I’ve had a number of S905X and S912 bpxes and ended up dumping all of the S905X’s.
S912 gives me Gigabit Ethernet and a faster SOC.
If you shop around eBay you can get some very cheap S912 boxes.
My current on that has 4 USB ports, 2Gb RAM and 16Gb storage cost me only £40 and works as well as I could want and expect.
I’m guessing you have a really nice TV if you want to play high bitrate HDR? but you wan’t to spend the least possible money to play your content?
It makes no sense pairing a $40 device with a $2000 TV, any N2 user will tell you the picture quality is far far superior and $130 is not a lot in the grand scheme of things, you could buy a handful of bluray films and spend that much.
Never the less if you want to be cheap then the best option is a Magicsee N5 or any other S905X device and a USB Gbit ethernet adapter as @TheCoolest suggested.
S912 has too many issues and it’s mainline progress is nowhere near it’s S905* counterpart.
Thanks all for your help 
Could you please go into the “buffer setting” in more detail ? I had a x96 mini (S.905W) and several USB 3.0 Gigabit adapters, unfortunately 50Mbits video files (H.265) didn’t work so well with them either…
Take a look at the guide here: KODI HOW-TO: Modify the video cache
Remember: Kodi requires 3x the amount of RAM to be free, so do not set the value too high as this will crash Kodi etc.
If you can’t play 50 Mbit samples then there is possibly something wrong at your part… Without changing the cache, I’m able to play Jellyfish 90 Mbit without stuttering. So should you.
You can setup ipferf to measure the throughput between server and box to see the performance.
That is true on small cache sizes but not on large ones.
For example the cache on my 4GB N2 is 2GB and the cache on my 2GB C2 is 1GB.
You will notice on such large cache sizes that the memory used is not larger than the cache.
As far as I’m aware if you set a cache size of 2GB (in advancedsettings.xml - that’s what you’re talking about?) you’ll use 2GB RAM and cache around 700MB video.
Yes this is what I’m talking about.
I tested this on my linux laptop (Kodi with a 2048MB cache) :
- Launch Kodi : + 222MB used RAM
- Start a 7630MB x265 movie : + 1054MB
- FF and RWD repeatedly until used RAM stabilised : + 1042MB (total 2096MB cache)
The cached movie length is roughly 13 min so about 1090MB.