We’re considering shutting down our media PC for good, as it’s aged, noisy and draws a lot of power. We’ve been googling around and it seems like Nvidia Shield would be a good substitute. However, we mainly seem to get the positive ads or positive reviews about it when we search around, and I would like to get some more “rounded” comments about it.
How does it perform with VPN? Can you stream games from other computers? Does it handle media streaming services well without lag? Is it a time/money sink?
I’ve owned and used the 2015 Shield for about 8 years and had a positive experience overall. My primary use is media streaming through online streaming services and via Plex (local on a NAS and remote from some friends across the country). For this, it’s been a smooth and snappy experience.
My 2015 Shield is definitely showing its age (no Dolby Vision support, which the 2019 version does have), but it’s codec support otherwise is excellent, especially for lossless audio like DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD.
I’ve streamed games from my computer a bit, but you should be aware that official GameStream support was ended about a month ago. There’s alternatives (such as Moonlight) but I haven’t tested them out yet.
That said, I’m of the opinion the Shield could use a refresh. The most recent 2019 version is still fine, but the processor isn’t significantly more powerful that other high-end streaming devices. And it could really use AV1 codec decoding (which admittedly very few other devices support yet).
Thank you for the info. This is the kind of info that I was missing, if I avoided Reddit and Quora (blech).