X96 Air Smart/Magicsee N5 Plus or Tanix TX9S 2GB RAM

Help & Support Hardware
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Hi, everybody,
I’m quite unsure which Android TV box is recommended apart from the Odroid N2 and runs stable. I can’t find a “blacklist” of non-functional boxes.
I myself don’t use my x96 mini with CoreELEC anymore because it didn’t always run well, S905w my “old” Beelink mx mini with S905 runs smoothly.

Thx

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I received my X96 Air the day before yesterday and tested it for about 12 hours within this two days, mostly playback of 4K HDR video contents. When I order the X96 Air, I hadn’t heard of the other two. I just read product description of Magicsee N5 Plus this morning.

With instructions compiled in another thread, setup CoreELEC on X96 Air was pretty simple and easy. I finished setup everything, including restore libraries, in one hour.

If I could choose again, between X96 Air and Magicsee N5 Plus, I prefer the latter. It is the heat that worry me most Despite there was not any issues during playback, I can feel the heat from the chassis and the USB drive I plugged in. Magicsee N5 Plus, at least, there are holes on the bottom to improve heat dissipation. That might explain why, in another thread, people shown they put holes (of which I planned to do the same thing) or.a 4" fan underneath the X96 Air.

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Thank you very much for the answer, experience.
The advantage I see with the S912 is probably the mature software, coreELEC will probably run well on the “Tanix TX9S” (I guess at least) It also offers 1GbE and is cheap at Gearbest ~22€.
On the other hand, the Magicsee N5 Plus is also interesting, USB3, and the possibility to install an SSD, but unfortunately no GbE. For a media center, this does not matter for a file server but too bad. However, I still have some GbE USB 3.0 adapters, which worked fine with the x96mini with NextCloudPi (Armbian).

I will order the Magicsee N5 Plus, ODROID-N2 CoreELEC Edition, 4 GByte RAM comes later. 100€ are not small… the “ASRock J4105-ITX” hardly costs more with RAM and power supply, but offers more free space thanks to x86.
In the long run, it would be wiser to use 905 x3 than S912.

Is the procedure for Magicsee N5 Plus different from the usual procedure, even if not recommended, is it possible to flash on the eMMC or SSD ?
Btw; I have both Android TV boxes open and a passive cooler glued on.

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Just to share my experience with Tanix TX9S. I recently bought it from gearbest (~USD$25), so we are talking about the exact same device.

With CE 9.2.1, everything works in TX9S including gigabit ethernet and Wifi. 4K play was smooth where my content was shared using NFS/wired connection. The only downside with TX9S is that it doesn’t have bluetooth, and the remote doesn’t work out-of-box (but there are guides to fix it).

As an android box, mine comes with kodi and netflix. The android interface is pretty slim without bloatware, and the GUI is very interactive.

for USD$25 I think TX9S makes an excellent CE box.

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Would you be kind enough to post the thread link?

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I do not understand temperature concerns. The lower is the best but if the internal temperature of a processor is below 75°C (even 80ºC) nothing happens nor is it necessary to use a fan. We also have to keep in mind that the HDMI output resolution and frequency need high processing requirements and they greatly influence the maximum temperature value.

My X96 Air has the following temperature values:

  • Ambient temperature: 23ºC
  • Processors temperature: 49ºC (idle) and 64ºC (watching HDTV 1920x1080i50Hz)
  • TV Box case temperature: 36ºC (watching HDTV 1920x1080i50Hz)
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