Recent reviews by Ar1stotle

Overall, I'm quite impressed. I feel like I'm more of a minority with the Link, so I feel like I should post a review with my perspective. Overall, I find this very useful. I'm pretty sensitive to latency, using a 144hz monitor and wired peripherals whenever possible. However, sometimes I do like to play casually with friends on the couch, and HDMI isn't always an easy option. Prior to purchasing the Link, I tried just doing in-home streaming from my laptop (Lenovo Y560p). It can't run most of the latest games at 1080p, but I figured Steam's streaming options would work well enough on it. I used ethernet to connect it to an 802.11AC access point, as the built-in 802.11G just didn't have the bandwidth to get 1080p streaming at all. It worked reasonably well at 720p for most games, but still struggled at 1080p. Input latency was shown as <1ms, but I would get tons of dropped frames in games like Doom. The more graphics intensive, the worse it seemed to be. So I was questionable when getting the Link, wondering if using it over 802.11AC was viable.

As it turns out, the Link performs much better than my laptop. Perhaps the decoder was just too weak to keep up with the video stream. I've tested the Link connected wirelessly to my UAP-AC-LITE, as well as over ethernet. I'm pleased to report that while ethernet does drop the display latency by about 5ms, I really can't feel much of a difference between wired and a good wireless 802.11AC connection. You can also shave off some of the video output latency by picking "fast" streaming over balanced. Of course, it doesn't look quite as nice.

So it feels just fine for games you're casually playing with a controller. But I had to give a keyboard/mouse a try, so I fired up CSGO. To my surprise, it was playable, but not at a competitive level. Between the wireless latency for inputs and video and the display lag on my HDTV vs my monitor, it feels sluggish. However, not unplayably sluggish like OnLive was back in the day. It's definitely possible to get kills playing against expert bots, but it's slow enough that you're not going to want to play any real matches.

Aside from performance, it's very easy to set up and use. It even starts up and turns on my Samsung TV when I hit the power button on my Xbox 360 controller. As a way to get some of your more casual games on the TV with friends, I think it's a solid deal for $50. It does a better job than my laptop for in-home streaming, and it's a fraction of the size. Just make sure you have a solid 5ghz connection.