[noggin]

Will a Chromebox 3 with an i7 cpu handle all 4k videos without stuttering etc.?

We have an Asus  Chromebox 3 with LibreElec. It has an Intel Celeron [email protected] M with a Mesa (Intel) HD 610 graphics card.

The Chromebox is our primary Kodi box, we have/had several others such as the original Asus Chromebox,  RPI 4 (also 3-2-1), Wetek Play2 and at least one other I can not remember the name.  Lately we started watching 4K movies and some are too much for the Celeron cpu, it hits 100% and starts to stutter on some of the software decodes. 

I know there are newer models but they cost more than we care to spend at this time.


thanks for your help,

Joe

 
A lot of UHD (aka 4K) content is now encoded in HEVC/h.265 rathe than AVC/h.264 which is more common for HD. The older Intel CPUs in the Asus Chromeboxes only hardware accelerate the older AVC/h.264 codec - so newer codecs like HEVC/h.265 have to be software decoded by the CPU, and the CPU isn't fast enough for the newer HEVC/h.265 in UHD/4K.

The Raspberry Pi 4B DOES do hardware decoding of HEVC/h.265 at UHD/4K - and LibreElec runs well on it (probably a better choice than installing Kodi on Raspberry Pi OS). However if you also have older UHD/4K AVC/h.264 content to play - the Pi 4B tops out at 1080p in that codec - so it's still not a perfect choice.

Personally I'd look at something like a Fire TV Stick or a Chromecast with Google TV if you need to keep costs down - as they will do hardware acceleration of pretty much everything at a low cost. You can also find AMLogic-based boxes that run CoreElec that cope with pretty much everything to. The downside of these ARM solutions is that if you have a large library or run heavy skins their CPUs struggle a bit in UI navigation terms - but in replay they're great. Alternatively a lot of the cheaper 'mini PCs' that are based on recent Intel Celeron and Pentium chips will do hardware HEVC/h.265 UHD/4K decode.

I used to run a Celeron Chromebox as my main Kodi solution as you are - but as I moved to UHD HDR content I realised I needed to replace the Chromebox. I'm running a mix of Apple TV 4K (for DRM streaming) and AMLogic + CoreElec and Raspberry Pi + LibreElec solutions elsewhere. (I don't currently have any Intel solutions)