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NZXT DOKO - Demonstration & First Impressions

2015-02-17
how's it going guys welcome back to the network today I'm checking out a PC streaming device from our friends at NZXT at just $99 dokgo is more than just proof that NZXT has a knack for four-letter words that don't make sense rather it's a device that allows you to stream from any PC in your house to virtually any TV in your house that means tasks such as web browsing media playback and even PC gaming can be achieved from the comfort of your own living room without having to invest in something like a home theater PC now this isn't to be confused with a mini PC since your desktop computer still does all of the heavy lifting of processing those various tasks at that point a signal carrying that information is sent over your local network to the dokgo to be decoded and then displayed on whichever TV it's connected to it may sound like sorcery but I assure you there are no hats involved now granted don't be surprised if the image or playback quality on your TV doesn't match up to what you natively experience on your desktop since sending all of that data over a LAN connection at full quality would simply take too long and introduce things like lag into the equation the data is first compressed into smaller pieces in order to achieve a smooth user experience but this of course comes with the price of decreased quality and this is true with any streaming device not just the dokgo nature of the beast I suppose at any rate the doko is capable of outputting a 1080p signal at a continuous 30 frames per second now by continuous I mean the frame rate on your TV never dips below 30 nor does it ever go above so while I speculate gameplay experience on the doko might be somewhat akin to that of a console you would be receiving a constant framerate at all times now that being said I think it'd be a smart move on NZXT teased part to make a 60fps model sometime in the future targeted at more ambitious gamers the device itself has a matte black finish with a rubberized coating and some branding on the top a power button on the front and four USB 2.0 ports for your keyboard mouse and other peripherals you can find a list on NZXT website of compatible peripherals but chances are most devices not listed will also work just fine I had absolutely no issues using my k70 RGB and rocket taeyeon neither of which were on the list finally on the back is a port for DC power HDMI 3.5 millimeter audio and gigabit ethernet device also comes included with power and Ethernet cables here's a look at the specs which may seem underwhelming at first but remember all of the processing is handled by your PC the dokos main job again is to decode the signal into a format that can be displayed on your television so how do the specs measure up to the task of hand join me on my quest to find the answer to the question that I just asked alright guys so I have now the dokgo hooked up to my television in my living room television who says television anymore my TV it's hooked up to my TV and that's via HDMI I've also got the ethernet cable connected to the back it doesn't support Wi-Fi so you got to get that you connect connection going and also power of course to my power outlet so right here oh by the way I've already installed the dokgo software on the desktop system in my office so that's the system that I'm going to be streaming from so with that software installed and run actively running on my system you can just power up the dokgo as soon as it's hooked up properly and it'll take you to this kind of menu screen if you will where it actually shows you all of your connected computers and you can connect multiple computers to the dokgo so that you can basically access any PC in your household so just for demo purposes I only have that one desktop hooked up right now so here it is there's a nice screen shot of my desktop as it currently is and you can hit the play button to initiate the streaming process happens pretty quickly and all of a sudden I'm seeing a mirrored image of what my desktop in my office is actually showing so here it is you can minimize the doko software which is super lightweight by the way which is nice oh also something I wanted to mention is that the monitor that I'm currently streaming from in my office is 2560 by 1440 the doko software did request that I bump it down to 1920 by 1080 to get the bit the best possible picture when streaming so I had to do that just just a note but let's jump into web browsing here I'm gonna open up Chrome and just go and I don't know let's just give us some basic searching this is really just shut up phone shut up this is basically just a really quick real-world experience this is the first time I've actually powered on the doko and used it myself so everything you're seeing right now is my initial impressions I've not messed with it before this filming process that you're seeing right now so everything you're seeing is it's not scripted it's not planned I'm just kind of going through the motions to see what kind of user experience I get so web-browsing seems okay there is a bit of input lag it's just very slight a couple of milliseconds which doesn't really matter much when you're doing basic tasks like web browsing but however if you are doing like a competitive gaming or you're even playing a game that requires really fast paced like response time then you might want to opt for a different solution just because you want to get the fastest possible reaction as you can but this looks pretty good I'm pretty there's nothing wrong nothing stands out to me here oh I opened up some virtual keyboard oh oh is that kind of keyboard and obviously audio is carried by that HDMI connection so you do get a beautiful audio coming out all right that's enough that oh you know what do we do a YouTube video will do YouTube video really quick so there is a bit of miss matching with the video and audio you can see my words don't exactly line up with my mouth I'll let you watch a little bit more so it's not exactly one to one right and that's because you're dealing with decoding times from the processing power of the Doku itself which by the way is just a hundred bucks so it's not like the state of the art decoding software or hardware but you're also dealing with the bandwidth issue of you know internet speeds and whatnot your bandwidth there so I don't know let's let's try to go to something other than dialogue so obviously this part is watchable obviously it's not as smooth as I'd be watching it organically from my desktop itself but it is watchable if you're in a group of people and you want to show them something but you don't have a PC connected to your living room TV this would be a good good solution for that like I said and as you just witness the dialog thing when people are talking at least with YouTube videos doesn't exactly match up as much as I'd like it to so bear that in mind but that's not the only test we're running today as far as video playback okay so the next video playback test I want to do is actually trying to play a video that I have state saved on to my desktop locally so I've got a few videos here let's let's watch theory this is this is the Brad Pitt one with tanks I believe very violent rated-r movie so if you guys are younger than 17 and you're without a parent make sure that you respond accordingly and spoiler alert in case you haven't seen this movie before and you're dying to know what happens in the end I won't skip to the end just for you all right so let's check it out all right so the audiovisual sync is not nearly as bad as it was with the YouTube video that I just showed you and it's very watchable also video quality isn't necessarily blu-ray quality as as this is a blu-ray rip at 1080 but again it is very watchable going to an action scene I can skip around here also looks pretty clean nothing really there's no lag whatsoever video playback is buttery smooth which is nice to see and audio and video is coming through pretty decent alright so that's good for video playback now I'm gonna try doing something that many of you are probably interested in and which is gaming so I'm gonna fire up steam actually seems already fired up and I'm gonna open up evolve which is like as recent of a game as it gets just launched earlier this week and I'm gonna do some multiplayer so we're gonna stress test pretty much everything here bandwidth limitations decoding this is a triple-a title it's not exactly lightweight by any means you for like a decent GPU so I'm gonna go skirmish and we're just gonna see how effectively I can actually play or enjoy a game streaming from this little box so little penis when I make a fast turn like again a little bit of input lag you really do sense it a little bit when you're when you're gaming like that little jump that I just did had it just a split second a few milliseconds of lag that's you know it's just a few milliseconds but when you're actually playing a game you feel it a lot more as far as graphics wise and quality wise I I would compare this to it to a console a current gen console like at ps4 and Xbox 360 I'm sorry an Xbox one whatever they call it it's it's pretty much on par with that alright so I'm in the heat of battle right now we finally got a hold of the monster i trapped him pretty good he just evolved then he's pretty pissed but his back turned to me right now so I know no he doesn't nobody doesn't where'd he go so a little bit of choppiness I'm not gonna lie it's not the smoothest playback but like everything everything else with the doko it's it's not the best but it is doable and it is usable and it is washable it is playable just you know it's a hundred bucks so you can't really fault it for for not doing everything at tip-top performance I probably wouldn't suggest it for something like this or for battlefield 4 even maybe for smaller games like Bastion for example a lot of indie games maybe Portal 2 would be a good option nothing super intensive especially when its bandwidth heavy like a game like Evolver battlefield 4 but all around pretty solid for a hundred bucks again I can't stress enough what a good deal that is for for just the additional layer of functionality you get in your living room alright so now that I gave online multiplayer games a chance I thought I would just jump into a single-player game without any bandwidth limitations so here I am playing Borderlands 2 this is just a solo campaign mission so no internet speeds involved I'm just gonna go ahead and play play a little bit here and then I take my time to shoot this guy in the head cuz he doesn't see me and I totally didn't kill him that's cool so now it's on okay those guys coming here - why hello oh boy so there was a little bit of lag right there I don't know if you guys could see it but there was a tiny bit of lag and I might die right here nevermind so I'm pretty much getting about the same amount of delay as I was playing balls which tells me that it's not really bandwidth limited as far as my internet speeds go but it's just the decoding power the processing power of the dokgo itself so maybe you know with a higher-end model in the future they can invest a little bit more on processing power and might have a little bit less lag as a result which would be nice but I think that pretty much sums up all the things that I wanted to say and all the things I wanted to show you about the doko streaming box from NZXT in my opinion like I said before I think it's a great little thing a great little device for a hundred bucks that really brings a lot more functionality to your living room or whatever room you want to put it in but what do you guys think let me know in the comments below what you would use it for if you think it's worth $100 price points if you think that's too aggressive or favorable I want to hear about that as well other than that leave me a like on this video if you enjoyed it feel free to subscribe to the channel for more tech videos coming really soon and I'll see you guys in the next one
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