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?
Moonlight + sunshine are the replacements for gamestream. They work well.
Not sure what you mean by lag in streaming services, but the interface for everything is generally snappier than any other set top device or tv-built-in ui (including mid-high range Sony TV that are years newer).
Since you mentioned replacing a media pc, you might be interested in the fact that shield can run plex (server and client).
I have both the older shield and the newer one. If you care about Dolby vision, you have to get the newer one.
I don’t find it to be a time/ money sink honestly. Certainly less than building a new pc or trying to get something like a NUC working.
My only gripe is that occasionally the hdmi handshake to my overall AV system can be janky. Not convinced that’s the fault of the shield though.
Well, we currently have a midrange Sony TV (2022) with Android as an OS and Plex installed, and I’ve been annoyed with the lag there and the inability to configure our interface the way we see fit. Thus we still had our media PC connected to it.
Moonlight really seems like a good option, as my kids like to stream and share content across the house, as well as gaming when we travel light.
Thank you for the info.
Quite welcome.
My Sony TV is either 2022 or 2021 (I forget) and it’s the 850 series. Shield tv interface (even the 2015 model) is noticeably much more responsive and configurable.