Hi –
Posted over in the Windows sub-forum as well… Thought you Android guys might shed some light in it too!
Apologize in advance – I’m an amateur at computer speak but enjoy trying to learn about it all, so I’m going to put my foot in my mouth more than once as I describe my confusion.
I’m a bit puzzled and have tried to answer my question via searching the forums. It hasn’t directed me to what I’m seeking, so I wanted to post it to you smarter folks out there! Last year I built a nice little Intel NUC to run Kodi…
5th generation i5 NUC
250 SSD to boot Win 10.1, second 500 SSD to store data
16g of the fastest ROM that was compatible at the time
Fairly clean drives with nothing on it except Kodi and a few media files (I stream all from my WD My Clouds).
Running Kodi 17 RC2
Internet is 50/50 (upgrading to 100/100 next week)
Generally things ran good. My 720 viewing was pretty seamless, and 1080 was a little glitchy and would pause to buffer a bit too often. I don’t do anything fancier yet because I’m still running my Pioneer KURO until it dies.
For the heck of it, I also sideloaded Kodi 17 RC2 onto my Generation 2 Fire TV box. Have both builds identical. Comparing between the two, The Fire TV seemed to sail through the 1080 stuff that the Intel NUC would pause and buffer on. I tried multiple streams and, eyeballing the results, the $79 Fire TV box seemed to consistently outperform my $600 (attempted) multimedia NUC build.
Installed an addon (I think we’re supposed to keep these nameless on the forum?) that allows me to check speeds. I ran the two and the NUC scored a 4 out of 10 (report was will stream 720 fine, may struggle with 1080 – confirmed my eyeball test). The Fire TV box scored an 8 out of 10 (report was 720, 1080, 3D will stream fine, may struggle with 4k).
I ASSumed that my NUC build would perform far superior compared to the Fire TV android box. Where did I go wrong? And/or is there anything I can do to increase the performance on my i5 NUC?
Thanks in advance!