CES2015 – NZXT

So the big news from NZXT was not what we expected.  Not a new AIO cooler or a new case.  Nope.  Not this time.  NZXT decided to go elsewhere.  Here we have the “Doko”, it’s a small box with a lot of potential:

On the front there is a power switch and 4 USB ports, while the rear has ports for power, LAN, HDMI and a 3.5mm jack for audio:

The power brick is a small wall wart rated for 12.5W of output power.  12.5W!  That’s about as much as your phone charger.

So what does it do?  Well it’s a streaming device.  Instead of building a HTPC or using a weaksauce laptop or NUC so that you can game on your TV in your living room without lugging your hulking pcmasterrace desktop to a different room you can use this device to remotely play games on your TV. Now this unit doesn’t just stream games – it streams whatever is on your screen on the main PC. In other words it’s like a remote desktop, because you can still use the keyboard/mouse/controller attached to the doko or the host PC.

Now this is the first edition so it’s clearly limited:

For example while it does 1080p it only does so at 30FPS, it also doesn’t feature Wi-Fi so you need to have a wired connection available.  If you don’t then you may have to try one of those powerline adapters which is an additional cost of course.  Of course you’ll also need some controllers suitable for the task.

While 30fps comes across as console peasantry, this isn’t designed to be able to perform as flawlessly as your main rig.  It’s not designed for competitive fps type games, but instead for being able to tread the middle ground between the terrible console life and the uber pc.  While 30fps is disappointing the lag on the other hand was not noticably enough to ruin your fun.  For me this is best suited for some fun with your buddies playing 4 player games like some indie games or mario kart on an emulator.

Of course if you already have a NUC or laptop you can do something similar with steam streaming, but of course that is just limited to games and then only to Steam, this of course should be able to stream anything you can run on your PC.

For the small amount of time I played on the test system at CES I was impressed, for $99 you get a decent amount of capability, and we’ll be playing with it in house soon as we have one here already.  The biggest concern for NZXT is not this device is bad, but that the Razer Forge is similarly priced and has the missing functionality that this doesn’t.  For example 60FPS, wi-fi, ability to use it as a standalone android box as well as a chromecast.  Of course on the other hand this can stream anything from your PC, while Razer only talks about being able to stream games. Of course the Forge also isn’t released yet, so as of today this is the best solution!  Expect more details soon.  For now you can check out our unboxing video from this morning: