Nvidia Shield Android TV Review

Final Thoughts

Price

The Nvidia Shield TV is available from retailers or directly from the Nvidia website with a price of £149.99, which I think is excellent value for money given the hardware specifications and performance. If you only want it for multimedia playback, there are cheaper devices on the market that will do the job, but in terms of gaming and multimedia, you won’t find anything better on the market. The additional controllers are £49.99, the TV remote is £24.99 as is the vertical stand. All in, things can get a little expensive, but again, if this fits the bill for the hardware you want and need, you really do get what you pay for.

Buy the Shield TV and accessories directly from Nvidia here.

Overview

Most smart TV’s these days are anything but smart. I’ve often experienced slow loading speeds, lackluster performance, limited storage and a fairly sporadic selection of applications from brand to brand. Then again, there are a lot of people out there who have TV’s that have no smart features at all. For either of these markets, the Shield TV is a mighty upgrade, unlocking a wide range of apps, video playback formats, streaming and more, with lightening fast performance to match.

There’s one major issue, however, and that’s the price. If you’re only wanting the Shield TV for smart TV functions, sure it’ll do a great job, but it’s pretty expensive when compared to some other devices on the market. To really justify the price, you need to be interested in the gaming features of the Shield TV and if you are, you’ll find plenty of gaming action here to justify every penny of the asking price and more.

The on-board Android performance is as good as it gets. The Tegra X1 blasts past the still very powerful Shield Tablet in any application, so 3D gaming is easily achieved and it’ll be a while before this device is knocked off the performance top spot. Moving on from there, you can take your powerful Nvidia graphics card in your main PC, use that to render a PC game as you would when playing at your desktop, and stream that to your TV. That means you could, for example, run Fallout 4 in Ultra settings on a 980Ti, but play it in the living room on the big screen, from the couch, with your Shield controller. Still not enough options? Let Nvidia render a game remotely for you and stream it right to the shield.

There’s no doubt that the Shield TV is a stronger gaming device than it is a media player, which is no bad thing as it’s a heck of a powerful media player too. It really does have the best of both worlds, but unless you’re planning to use both of these aspects, you may find it a little expensive. If you’re wanting this for its 4K features, keep in mind that you’ll want the latest HDMI 2.0 spec and HDCP or you will run into some limitations, unfortunately, not a lot of TVs have this so you may want to do your research first.

Pros

• Class-leading performance
• Flawless 4K video playback
• Huge range of gaming capabilities
• Easy to use UI
• Voice search functions on controller and remote work very well
• Competitive price (taking gaming features into account)
• Sleek design
• Virtually silent performance

Cons

• A bit expensive (if only using for media playback)
• Not a lot of displays have the required spec for the full 4K performance (although that is slowly changing)

Neutral

• 8mbps and low ping internet needed for game streaming
• Nvidia desktop GPU required for local streaming of games

“The Nvidia Shield TV is the perfect addition to any home AV setup. If you want to experience truly next-gen Smart TV features and ‘mobile’ gaming that can give many console and desktop gaming experiences a run for their money, then you’re going to love what the Shield TV has to offer. This much power, in such a small device, with a relatively competitive price is simply too good to ignore.”

Thank you Nvidia for providing us with this sample.