Nvidia Shield TV Tegra X1 Mod

[ZTylerDurden]

Hey guys,

I own an Nvidia Shield Portable and it's one of my favorite gadgets for its retro gaming portability and game streaming.

Nvidia canned their Shield Portable 2 (probably to not compete against their Nintendo Switch partnership) although they're doing well with their console-like Nvidia Shield TV that packs their Tegra X1 processor.

The Tegra X1 packs a lot of power and for the price you'd have to buy a really expensive smart phone for a mobile solution.

Since you guys make retro consoles portable (the impossible possible!), would it be possible to make the Nvidia Shield TV portable? It'd be an Nvidia Shield Portable spiritual successor mod.

I was wondering if there's any fundamental "show-stoppers" of making a circuit board like this portable versus your retro console mods.

Would love to hear thoughts from the experienced builders.

 

[YveltalGriffin]

I've looked into this quite a bit, and it's probably doable. The first-gen Shield TV has a separate I/O board that's linked to the main board with a chunky ribbon cable...

...so you'd want to use the second-gen Shield TV from 2017, which has a more integrated all-in-one mainboard:


The Shield 2017 also has a TPS53015 to drop the 19V input to 5V, so you could probably just hot-air that off and use a different reg to power it from some li-ion cells, assuming the 19V isn't used for anything critical.

Once you got the power stuff figured out, the only other issue would be compact cooling. You could probably just use a Nintendo Switch heatpipe and fan, or maybe an ultrabook cooling setup.

I always wanted to pair it with a nice 6" 1080p TopFoison panel for those sexy IPS colors and viewing angles:


As you can tell, I've been wanting to mess around with this myself, but Shields are expensive, and I'm lazy

 

[ZTylerDurden]

That is excellent!

The IPS photos look so good. How is that connected to the motherboard? Directly to the motherboard or a quick demo via HDMI?

 

[YveltalGriffin]

That's just my PC hooked up via HDMI, running Dolphin and CEMU. TopFoison's screens are pretty gorgeous.

The MIPI driver board doesn't have a scaler built in, so the device you hook up must output 1080p at all times.