It surely took a while - but Nvidia have released their Shield game console slash SHIELD Android TV box to the European Benelux market and, being based in the Netherlands, as such we have received a sample for review. The Android TV box based unit is a little gem as it properly takes over your Smart TV experience, but can also function as a simplistic game console, next to that you can use Nvidia Grid to stream games (subscription based) and if you install Kodi you can expand this unit towards a fully fledged Ultra HD ready media player.

Nvidia has two models available in the market, the 'regular' version with 16GB internal storage, and also a 500 GB model. Both units come with that nice Nvidia controller, yet Nvidia currently includes a free remote, which I can already tell you, is probably the best media remote we have tested to date.

Nvidia submitted their smaller 16GB version of the Nvidia Shield set-top console, the unit is priced at 200 USD/EURO, the 500GB model adds another 100 bucks to that pricing. The SHIELD Android TV is powered by a Nvidia Tegra X1 processor with a 256-core based Maxwell GPU equipped with 3GB RAM all running Google's Android operating system. Once we connect the unit to a viable 5G WIFI network (Gigabit Ethernet also supported) the unit automatically tries to update itself rapidly towards Android v6, also known as the latest Android Marshmallow.