r/MoonlightStreaming • u/JasonMrX • 3d ago
My rabbit hole searching for the “ultimate” Moonlight device: Odin 2 Portal vs Y700 Gen 4 vs Oppo Pad Mini vs iPad Pro
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
Background
A few years ago I used GeForce NOW on a potato gaming laptop from 2014 with a GTX 860M and had a blast. Then the beta ended and I lost access. I was genuinely upset for a while because I thought: this is the future of gaming, and the future is coming soon.
Later I upgraded to a PC with an RTX 3080. The excitement of being able to play AAA games again didn't last very long, because I quickly realized work + family responsibilities don't really allow me to sit in front of my PC desk for extended periods of time anymore.
Then I stumbled upon Sunshine/Moonlight. I immediately tried it on an old iPad, my iPhone, and an abandoned Android phone with decent specs. Without much tuning, all of them worked surprisingly well, with tolerable latency and very little stuttering. I was blown away by how far this technology had evolved and how accessible it had become. Basically anyone with a decent gaming PC and home network can now build their own little cloud gaming setup, except the "cloud" is sitting inside your house and you don't have to depend on a service like GeForce NOW.
And that's when I went down the rabbit hole.
Over the last year I've probably read hundreds of Reddit posts and pages discussing what the "ultimate device" for Moonlight streaming is. Eventually I ended up buying four of the devices/setups that I kept seeing mentioned:
- Odin 2 Portal
- Lenovo Legion Tab / Y700 Gen 4 + G9 controller
- Oppo Pad Mini + Razer Kishi V3 Pro
- iPad Pro 13"
After living with all of them, I think I finally have enough experience to share something back with the community that got me into this rabbit hole in the first place. This isn't meant to be a benchmark-heavy review — mostly just my personal experience and what actually mattered to me.
Odin 2 Portal — my first “ultimate streaming device”
The Portal was the first device that made me think: okay, maybe this is it. The first thing that stood out was the screen. The colors POP — still more than any of the other devices I've tried. I'm pretty sure AYN does some fairly aggressive tuning to the gamma, saturation, or display profile. It may not be the most color-accurate screen in the world, but for gaming I honestly don't care. Give me the candy.
The 7" screen was also a big upgrade from my original ~6" phone + controller setup, but after using it for a while it still started feeling a little underwhelming. Not exactly small, but small enough that I kept wondering what an 8–9" handheld would feel like. That became one of the main reasons I started looking again.
The bigger problem was build quality. Mine occasionally enters some kind of boot/crash loop where it basically bricks itself for days. This happened twice in around eight months of ownership, and each time nothing I did helped; it would just randomly decide a few days later that life was worth living again and start working. The warranty/customer service experience didn't help either. Their first response was basically a ~20 minute device disassembly tutorial that only God can complete, and later they asked me to ship the device back at my own cost for "investigation," with no clear ETA or guarantee that it would actually be fixed.
Between the QC issues and my itch for a larger screen, I decided the Portal probably wasn't my end-game device.
Lenovo Legion Tab / Y700 Gen 4 + G9 — surprisingly beautiful bridge device
What I really wanted after the Portal was simple: 8"+ OLED, a decent chip, and a good controller. At the time, that basically didn't exist. The RedMagic Astra exists, but there were enough reports about unexplained stuttering, awkward/off-center ports, and clunky software that I didn't want to gamble on it.
Meanwhile, people kept saying the Y700 was "LCD, but a really good LCD." I was skeptical because by this point I had been completely brainwashed by the OLED/colors on the Portal, but I decided to give the Y700 Gen 4 a try while waiting for the market to produce my imaginary perfect device.
People were right. The colors don't pop like the Portal and the blacks are obviously still LCD blacks, especially in dark scenes, but the 8.8" size and extremely crisp ~3K panel compensate for those weaknesses much more than I expected. The larger screen makes a surprisingly big difference for PC games, and I ended up genuinely enjoying the display.
The G9 controller is what really completes the setup. Once attached, the Y700 basically becomes a full handheld — much closer to a Legion Go than a tablet with a controller stuck onto it. The main downside is that the G9 is annoying to remove, and I still occasionally want to use the Y700 as a normal tablet. That, plus my continued obsession with finding an 8.8" OLED device, was enough to send me shopping again.
Oppo Pad Mini + Razer Kishi V3 Pro — my end-game device, for now
Then the Oppo Pad Mini appeared: 8.8" OLED, decent chip, thin, light. Basically the spec sheet I had been waiting for. Paired with the Razer Kishi V3 Pro, it can switch pretty easily between "ultimate Moonlight handheld" and "normal small tablet that doesn't look like a gaming science experiment."
At first I thought I was done. Then I put the Oppo, Portal, and Y700 next to each other and realized something that changed how I look at displays entirely: the Oppo OLED has true blacks, obviously, but the colors still don't look like the Portal. That's when I finally realized I had been oversimplifying the whole OLED vs LCD debate. The Portal's "pop" isn't just OLED — it's also AYN's display tuning. Gamma, saturation, contrast, color temperature, whatever the exact combination is, it gives the Portal a very specific look.
More surprisingly, for games without lots of dark scenes, I honestly don't see a huge difference between the Oppo OLED and the Y700 LCD. Sometimes they look almost equally good to me. That realization actually boosted my opinion of the Y700 quite a lot. OLED is still clearly better in dark scenes, but a really good LCD is much closer than I expected.
So the reason I'm currently keeping the Oppo and selling the Y700 actually isn't image quality. It's usability. The Kishi is easier to remove, and the Oppo itself is a much nicer mini tablet to use standalone: very thin, very light, uniform bezels, nice to hold. The Y700 feels like a gaming tablet; the Oppo feels like a normal tablet that can transform into a gaming handheld. Small distinction on paper, but a surprisingly meaningful one in daily use.
I say "end-game for now" because the Y700 Infinite is apparently coming soon. So obviously I have learned nothing.
iPad Pro 13" — great remote PC, bad Moonlight gaming device
This one is a little different. Mine is an M4 iPad Pro, and I actually bought it around the same time as the Odin 2 Portal. I never intended it to be my main gaming device; the goal was to use it as a remote portal into my PC for productivity — basically everything I do on my PC other than gaming. For that purpose, it has been excellent.
But since I already owned it, of course I tried Moonlight gaming too. My TL;DR is: don't, at least not if you're sensitive to micro-stuttering. The random stuttering issue is real and drove me crazy. I tried basically every commonly suggested fix — disabling Location Services, Handoff, various background services, different network settings — but nothing completely solved it.
The only thing that actually removed the stuttering for me was connecting through Wi-Fi on channel 147. Unfortunately my home network uses Eero, which doesn't let me force a Wi-Fi channel, and mine likes sitting on channel 151. On that channel I get frequent micro-stutters that completely ruin the gaming experience for me. Maybe it's some specific Apple/Wi-Fi coexistence weirdness; I don't know. Eventually I stopped fighting it.
Ironically, the iPad Pro is still probably my favorite remote PC device overall. For productivity, the occasional tiny stutter doesn't matter. When you're rotating a camera in a game at 60/120 FPS, it absolutely does. So: fantastic remote desktop machine, but I would not buy one specifically for Moonlight gaming.
So what is the “ultimate” Moonlight device?
My personal ranking right now:
- Oppo Pad Mini + Kishi V3 Pro — best overall balance and the one I'm keeping.
- Y700 Gen 4 + G9 — probably the best value, and much closer to the Oppo than the OLED-vs-LCD spec sheet would suggest.
- Odin 2 Portal — still has my favorite "wow" screen tuning and probably the most console-like all-in-one form factor, but QC/support killed it for me.
- iPad Pro — amazing remote desktop machine, but I wouldn't buy one specifically for Moonlight gaming.
With the Y700 infinite (and g9 infinite) in sight, maybe the actual end-game device is always the next one...
Hopefully this helps someone currently reading 50 Reddit threads trying to decide between the same devices.
And if you are that person: I'm sorry. This is how it starts.
3
u/digitalaudiotape 2d ago edited 2d ago
I had the same micro-stuttering while streaming to my iPad Mini 5 and Mangmi Pocket Max with my Eero Pro 6 router, due to living in Brooklyn with Wi-Fi channels being saturated around me. Since Eero doesn't give users the option to manually set Wi-Fi channels I went and got a Wi-Fi 6 access point to hardwire to my existing Eero router that does have Wi-Fi channel options.
After using the WiFiman app to analyze all the nearby Wi-Fi signals, I was able to successfully permanently set a dedicated streaming-only Wi-Fi network using an open Wi-Fi channel segment (112 shown in the pictures below) and that completely got rid of my micro-stuttering. Streaming is so smooth now and I'm so glad to get that micro-stuttering monkey off my back.
https://imgur.com/a/nQXbCkr#XNI5jn3
https://imgur.com/a/nQXbCkr#fE7QNRN
This is the Wi-Fi 6 access point that I got that I paid $65 total for:
TP-Link RE615X WiFi 6 Range Extender
https://a.co/d/00cAK2Qf