Zidoo H6 Pro (Allwinner H6) TV Box Review – Part 1: Unboxing & Teardown

Allwinner H6 is a quad core Cortex A53 processor designed for 4K HDR set-top boxes and TV boxes that also comes with high speed interfaces like USB 3.0 and PCIe. While at least one other company is working on an Allwinner H6 development board, Zidoo is the only company that I can find whose made a TV box based on the processor: Zidoo H6 Pro.

They’ve just send me a sample from their local supplier for review, and as usual, I’ll start by checking out the hardware inside out, before testing the firmware and multimedia capabilities in the second part of the review in a few weeks.

Zidoo H6 Pro Unboxing

The company has slightly changed the design of their retail package. It also shows some icons with the main features like 4K, 3D,  H.265, 2GB DDR4, Android 7.0 with ZIUI, etc…

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The box ships with a HDMI cable, a 5V/2A power supply, a Bluetooth + Infrared remote control taking two AAA batteries, a user guide in English, a guarantee card, and a “qualified certificate”.

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The main body of the case is made of metal, but the top is glass. We’ll find a window on the front panel that looks to be for an LCD display, but as we’ll see below it’s only for an IR receiver, and a small hole is used for the power LED.

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The two sides includes two USB 2.0 ports, including one OTG port, one USB 3.0 port, and a micro SD card slot. The rear panel features an AV (composite + stereo audio) jack, an HDMI 2.0a port, Gigabit Ethernet, optical S/PDIF, and the power jack.

Zidoo H6 Pro Teardown

We can peak inside the device after loosening four screws on the bottom of the case.

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Not much to see here, except a metal shield placed on the bottom side of the processor and RAM chips. A sticker makes sure I got a board with 2GB RAM, and 16GB flash. I wonder what the orange rectangle with a hole in the middle is for. Any idea?

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If we take out for more screws we can completely remove the board from the case. We’ll find the WiFi antenna attached to a sticky surface (if you look closely, an ant also got captured, not sure a Chinese or Thai ant though :)), and cooling is achieving with a small heatsink placed on top of Allwinner H6 SoC.

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Two 8Gb (512MB x 16) SKHynix H5AN8G6NAFR-UHC DDR4-2400 brings us 2GB RAM, while a 16GB Samsung KLMAG2GEND-B031 eMMC 5.0 flash is used for storage. Its theoretical performance is: 230/50 MB/s for sequential R/W, and 6.5K/6K R/W IOPS, which should allow for a responsive system, free of “app not responding” issues. Ampak AP6255 module enables 802.11 b/g/n/ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2, while Realtek RTL8211E transceiver and SG24002 transformer are used for Gigabit Ethernet. X-Powers AXP805 should be Allwinner H6 companion chip to handle power management.  Other potentially details include the recovery button hidden behind the AV port, and the 3-pin connector close to the processor should be the serial console.

 

I normally leave the remote control alone in my reviews. But since Zidoo decided to include a Bluetooth remote, it went through the “operation table” too.

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We can see both the IR transmitter, and the Bluetooth antenna inside the remote control. The brain of the input device is Realtek RTL8762AG Bluetooth 4.2 Low Energy chip, part of RTL8762A family, based on an ARM Cortex-M0 MCU with 256KB eFlash, and 80KB RAM.

I can see the chip supports an “OTA (Over-the-Air) programming mechanism for firmware upgrade”, so in theory Zidoo could send OTA firmware updates to the remote control, but I doubt this will happen 🙂

I’d like to thank Zidoo for sending a review sample. Distributors and resellers may inquire the company via the product page, and individuals can purchase the TV box for around $90 on various websites including GearBest, GeekBuying, ChinaVasion, Banggood, and others.

Continue reading Zidoo H6 Pro (Allwinner H6) TV Box Review – Part 2: Android 7.0 Firmware.

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