RAZER is the gaming brand that keeps rising and expanding. This time, the company is entering a new market with the introduction of Forge, an Android TV micro-console which is capable of running Android apps and games, but can also stream PC games on a local network.
RAZER has opted for a powerful Snapdragon 805 SoC with 4-cores, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, WIFI AC and Gigabit Ethernet – the networking options are important for the PC game streaming capabilities. To make sure that players have a great controller, RAZER also has a matching controller (the “Serval”), which has been designed by the same team which worked on the Razer Sabertooth Xbox controller.
This is remarkably different from other Android “boxes” because Forge uses one of the best SoC on the market, which means that it is as powerful as the best Android devices out there. Most other competitors have picked older hardware (like Ouya – also at $99) which severely limits their ability to play the most intensive Android games.Prior to RAZER Forge, the NVIDIA Shield Series was the only truly serious hardware designed for Android gaming, but the $99 price is a great entry point when compared to the more expensive console or tablet from NVIDIA.
In terms of multimedia, the hardware capabilities can pretty much outmatch any media that you would throw at it. So, the real question is what kind of services are available. Android has a vast ecosystem, but you will need to do a little bit of homework to figure out what’s available and optimized for the TV.
PC Game Streaming
As we mentioned earlier, RAZER Forge is also capable of streaming games from a local networked PC. Again, this is impossible not to compare this with the NVIDIA Shield products which introduced this capability and make it work neatly.
Called Cortex Stream, this feature claims to provide full HD, low-latency, game streaming over WiFi or Ethernet. Cortex can also run with any graphics hardware, whether it is NVIDIA or AMD.
It will be really interesting to see how the user interface works, and what the frame-rate and latency looks like in a real world situation. "THIS IS AN IMPRESSIVE PRODUCT"
At $99, RAZER Forge is extremely interesting and aggressively priced. It opens the possibility to have the most powerful Android apps running smoothly on a big screen and treats both multimedia and gaming seriously, in a price envelope that is on par with other TV boxes. This is an impressive product.
Product specs:
- Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 805
- Quad-Core Krait 450 CPU – 2.5 GHz per core
- Adreno™ 420 GPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 16 GB storage
- Bluetooth 4.1 + HS
- Wireless 802.11ac 2X2
- Gigabit Ethernet
- USB 3.0
- HDMI 1.4 output
- DC Power
- 4.1 in. (105 mm) Width x 4.1 in. (105 mm) Depth x 0.7 in. (17 mm) Height
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