The first Rockchip RK3566 TV box is out with H96 Max running Android 11

Rockchip RK3566 is a quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with plenty of peripherals designed for AIoT and NVR applications. While it still supports features like high-dynamic range or video post-processing, it’s not really optimized for TV boxes, but this has not stopped the maker of H96 Max “8K UltraHD” TV box to launch an RK3566 model with 4GB RAM and 8GB RAM now sold for respectively $59.99 and $76.99 on Banggood.

H96 Max 8K UHD

H96 Max RK3566 TV box specifications:

  • SoC – Rockchip RK3566 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with Arm Mali-G52 EE GPU, 0.8 TOPS NPU/AI accelerator
  • System Memory / Storage configuration
    • 4GB DDR3, 32GB  eMMC flash, and MicroSD card
    • 8GB DDR3, 64GB  eMMC flash, and MicroSD card
  • Video Output – HDMI 2.0a up to 4Kp60 with 3D support,
  • Video decoding
    • 4Kp60 H.264/H.265/VP9
    • VC1 up to 1920 x 1080 @ 60fps
    • MPEG-4 up to 1920 x 1080 @ 60fps
    • HDR10 and HLG modes
  • Audio – Optical S/PDIF output, digital audio output via HDMI,
  • Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 4.0
  • USB – 1x USB 3.0 port, 1x USB 2.0 port
  • Misc – Power/standby LED,
  • Power Supply – DC 5V/2A
  • Certification – CE, FCC, ROHS

RK3566 TV BoxSo you may wonder where is 8K video? There’s no support for 8K video despite the name “H96 Max 8K UltraHD”, the company just put an 8K logo there, because it sells?

The TV box runs Android 11 with RKMC 18.1, Neflix, Vudu, Skype chatting, Picasa, Flicker, Youtube, Facebook pre-installed. Do not expect official Netflix Full HD/4K support on this device. It ships with a power adaptor, HDMI cable, user manual, and Bluetooth voice remote control by default. I’m not quite sure who needs a TV box with 8GB RAM, but if you do, it may be the first Arm-based TV box with that much memory.

Via AndroidPC.es

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29 Comments
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Anonymous
Anonymous
3 years ago

No AV1 decode in the RK3566. Nice RAM though, very epic.

I think I saw a similar fake branding of “6K” support on a recent box.

Typo: 1088 -> 1080.

Pete
Pete
3 years ago

“I’m not quite sure who needs a TV box with 8GB RAM”.

Mine with 3GB gets sluggish and I have to manually close apps. I imagine a number bigger than 4 would help.

Anonymous
Anonymous
3 years ago

From the Mecool KM6 Deluxe review on this very website, running Android TV 10: “I also sometimes noticed that the system got stuck for a few seconds. This doesn’t happen often but decreases the overall experience quality. When it got too bad I restarted the system and all was well again. It seems I’m always getting out of memory. If I’ve got this issue with the 4GB model, I would guess the 2GB version would easily get out of memory. With a fresh reboot, I’ve only got 2.28GB of free memory.” Throwing 8 GB at it might be an extreme… Read more »

tkaiser
tkaiser
3 years ago

> From the Mecool KM6 Deluxe review on this very website

Please keep in mind that this wasn’t a real review. The guy relied on a Windows tool that has been ported over to Android presenting a certain amount of ‘Available memory’ then renaming that to ‘free memory’. Maybe both AIDA64’s and the review’s author have a limited understanding of the Linux kernel’s virtual memory implementation?

TLS
TLS
3 years ago

Lovely, as some “smart” TVs ship with 1.5GB…

Arnd Bergmann
Arnd Bergmann
3 years ago

I’m also a big fan of getting twice as much RAM as everyone else for any device I get, it tends to make it still usable a few years later when new software assumes this is what everyone has. Having 8GB also means this can be a usable low-end PC replacement once distro kernels support the SoC well enough. I’d definitely take a device like this over a random developer board without a case, or over another TV box with a faster processor but less RAM. I’d love to see a box like this with the wifi module on an… Read more »

tkaiser
tkaiser
3 years ago

> wifi module on an m.2 card that can be replaced with an SSD

Good luck since neither key E nor A are suited for NVMe SSDs (key M and a handful B-M). And for adapters like https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08B3R5Y4G you’ll need to make huge openings into your TV box enclosure 😉

Arnd Bergmann
Arnd Bergmann
3 years ago

Indeed, I was confused there. I had previously seen hacks to add a second SSD to a laptop, but that must have been a B-Key WWAN modem slot then, not the WLAN slot.

diyprojectz
diyprojectz
3 years ago

But with adapter outside the case, we can install m.2 nvme SSD, or even something like 4-port SATA controller for a full-blown NAS! Beats most SBCs which still don’t include PCIe and/or enough SATA. And all we need is a tiny cut in the case for the ribbon!

Need to confirm that slot is PCIe, though. Some m.2 wifi cards are SDIO (e.g. stuff that goes into Rock Pi N10)…

Jens
Jens
3 years ago

I regular miss in these specs whether these boxes support AC3 audio passthrough via HDMI. This is essential if you want to connect an A/V-receiver which i guess is a very common use case for these boxes. After having a lot of bad experience with Win 10 and Mac OS I wonder how it works with Android. I never had probems with Raspberry Pi but it sucks in other areas. Has anyone experience with this?

nobitakun
nobitakun
3 years ago

It’s incredible how android can be so unoptimized and full of crap, I think it is by far the most slow OS for phone I’ve ever seen. And I don’t see it’s going to disappear anytime soon in favour to something better, pitiful 🙁

TLS
TLS
3 years ago

Eh? I have no issues with phone. Maybe don’t buy a $100 phone?

dgp
dgp
3 years ago

>I think it is by far the most slow OS for phone I’ve ever seen

What other “OS for phone” do you have to compare with? Symbian?

willy
willy
3 years ago

It’s not so much the OS that’s to blame as the modern applications in general. Why browsing the web in 2021 with 4x4GHz and 16GB of RAM has to be much slower than it was in 96 on a 486DX2-66 with 16MB RAM using Netscape 2, often forcing me to kill the browser to stop “Web Content” from spinning ? Because web site developers have an infinite amount of resources to make their code run on (the visitors’ browsers) and trade efficiency for speed of development. Sadly this has become the norm in virtually any application nowadays, but fortunately the… Read more »

Redneckerz
Redneckerz
3 years ago

Pretty enticing offer honestly: The cheaper variant is on par with most TV boxes in their ”high end” out fit (4 GB RAM, 32 GB SSD). They usually have Amlogic S905X2/X3/X4 variants, so Cortex A55, but Mali G31 MP2. Upgrading the GPU to Mali G52 MP2 is wonderful and will provide a healthly performance boost since Mali G52 is the ”mid-end” mobile GPU on ARM 8 GB is definitely a novelty, in the same vein that you see Amlogic S905X3 based boxes that have a drive bay for 2 TB HDD for around the same price (75-90 bucks). A novelty… Read more »

Pete
Pete
3 years ago

Previous generation “tv box” SoCs didn’t support more than 4GB (3 GB on Allwinner A64).

I use Taskbar from the f-droid repository as my desktop-style launcher, which supports a start menu and windowed apps.

Willy
3 years ago

> The only minus would be the A55 cores – They are better than A53’s, but clearly not one of the ”big” A7X based cores. The A55 benefits from a much faster memory controller than the older ones and can easily run side-to-side with A72 or A73 on memory-bound workloads where latency counts. And when you factor in the frequency ratio you can have in a similar thermal envelope, it’s not that difficult to have a 2 GHz A55 run at comparable performance levels to an 1.5 GHz A72 for example. Just the CPU cores alone would deliver 5.3 vs… Read more »

Arnd Bergmann
Arnd Bergmann
3 years ago

The problem I see in practice is that the SoCs with the “little” A53 or A55 cores also tend to be much more limited in cache size and memory bandwith compared to higher-end SoCs that not just have faster cores but also larger caches and wider memory interfaces. The new rk3566 and the s905x both come with L1 I/D cache of 32KB each per core, no per-core L2 cache and a shared last-level cache of 512KB. This is the same layout as the ancient rk3188 with its Cortex-A9 cores. In the latest Snapdragon 888 by contrast, there are of course… Read more »

willy
willy
3 years ago

I generally agree with the points you made, but here we’re comparing cores more than whatever else can be changed around such as the cache. I tried on 3 of my machines to build haproxy-2.3.0 with gcc-7.5.0 in RAM with all available cores at the highest frequency (no throttling), here’s what I got: rpi4b (4xA72-2.0GHz): 83.8 seconds nanopi-m4 ([email protected] + [email protected]): 70.8 seconds VIM3L (4xA55 @1.9): 109.3s So the A55 is indeed slower than its competitors here but not that much (24% slower than RPi4b-2.0 GHz for GHz). This also means that it should slightly beat the RPi4b at stock… Read more »

willy
willy
3 years ago

Edit, VIM3L was polluted by “unattended upgrades” running in background at boot… 4 cores give 108s and 2 cores give 178s. Thus it’s almost as fast as the A72 in RK3399 clock-for-clock. The reason definitely is the RAM and cache speed. The L1 in the A55 is up to 50% faster than the one in the A72 here, and the RAM speed is twice as fast (kB/s per access type): vim3l:$ ~/ramlat -s  size:  1x32   2x32   1x64   2x64  1xPTR  2xPTR  4xPTR     4k: 631722 632095 632174 631985 948417 632537 466908     8k: 632077 632373 630001 632355 948252 632349 466899    16k: 631460 631905 632149 631726 947609 631376 466556    32k: 607688 627943 618156 627786 941098 600215 433170    64k:  71676  61364  71246  61572  73023  61957  40453   128k:  63174  62039  63212  61845  67544  61981  35465   256k:  60082  60697  60499  60465  58124  52563  31090   512k:   7769  21127  23886  22841  21919  22347  14971  1024k:   8957   8858   9409   8816   9417   8712   5987  2048k:   8216   8035   7541   7503   7608   7579   5235  4096k:   7730   7502   7522   7506   7567   7535   5188  8192k:   7363   7162   7239   7251   7300   7248   5100  16384k:   7226   7030   7192   7072   6836   7152   4896 123456789101112131415 vim3l:$ ~/ramlat -s size:  1x32   2x32   1x64   2x64  1xPTR  2xPTR  4xPTR    4k: 631722 632095 632174 631985 948417 632537 466908     8k: 632077 632373 630001 632355 948252 632349 466899    16k: 631460 631905 632149 631726 947609 631376 466556    32k: 607688 627943 618156 627786 941098 600215 433170    64k:  71676  61364  71246  61572  73023  61957  40453   128k:  63174  62039  63212  61845  67544  61981  35465   256k:  60082  60697  60499  60465  58124  52563  31090   512k:   7769  21127  23886  22841  21919  22347  14971  1024k:   8957   8858   9409   8816   9417   8712   5987  2048k:   8216   8035   7541   7503   7608   7579   5235… Read more »

Theguyuk
Theguyuk
3 years ago

The designs of the boards and components used for Amlogic S905 D\ X3, X4 can make a large difference in results. As YouTube TV box testers, have shown. In speed results, Synthetic and real world.

Arnd Bergmann
Arnd Bergmann
3 years ago

Thanks for sharing the numbers, very interesting.

I see that the Raspberry Pi 4 in your tests has a much harder time scaling to more than two CPUs, i.e. it’s much faster in the two-core test than the other two, but only 30% faster when all cores are in use.

willy
willy
3 years ago

Yes, you definitely see that its memory bandwidth is severely limited and unsuitable for 4 cores. Comparatively, the RK3399 on single core suffers from some limitation, but its cores scale better because not all the available bandwidth is used by a single core. So I’d say that the RK3399 performs well when all its cores are running, but that it could perform much better with a single core than it actually does. I’ve been suspecting that they do this to leave a little bit of bandwidth to the 4 poor A53 there. These ones only have 64-bit read for 128-bit… Read more »

tonny
tonny
3 years ago

I’m curious with RK3566 power consumption vs s905x2~4 (22nm vs 12nm) at their best settings.

Theguyuk
Theguyuk
3 years ago

Sad to see the new HK1 ( RK3566 ) and the new A95X ( S905X4 ) have gone with colour leds. Would be better to spend the leds cost on better performance components..

Brett
Brett
3 years ago

Do you know if you can turn off the display?

debbie
3 years ago

i have the android box T95 Plus running android 11. I can seem to jailbreak or root it HELP any suggestions

debbie
3 years ago

i have the Android Box T95 Plus running 11.0 I simply want to jailbreak or Root it can anyone help

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