Intel recently sold the NUC brand to Asus, so recent NUCs (since generation 12 or 13) are branded Asus while yours (gen7) was branded Intel. With this sale, all the NUC documentation, including for the older, Intel-branded ones, was moved to the Asus site. The NUC 7i3 documentation still applies to your Intel NUC, even though it is now served by the Asus site.
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A new NUC is probably the better option, then.
Not sure ROCK and RoonOS has the capability to use the Performance and Efficiency cores of the latest CPU architectures properly & move highly demanding processes to the different core dynamically.
And just like those recommending the highest specified NUC, it all comes down to single core performance.
I still got lots of performance from the lowliest NUC5i3, 8GB and 240GB SATA SSD which I used for years. I have 2 of these as backup if my NUC7i7DN with 16GB & 250GB NVMe SSD goes pop - but not a wobble and does everything I need it to do everytime, against a library of 106k tracks & 7 zones. I only use DSP with an OPRA headphone profile on ARC, which has always works through a UPnP configured Firewall port routing.
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Thank you. Yes, I found the file for my i3 BIOS update. I wasn’t reading the page carefully enough.
Thank you. Good to know this. I now have the file to update the BIOS and give it a go. Looks like 13i3s are a bit scarce in Aus right now, and I wouldn’t get one this side of Christmas anyway. So I’ll have a play, backup my database, update the BIOS, do clean UEFI install, and see how I go. I appreciate your insights. Thank you.
Funny. I had the same experience last fall when I installed Rock on a brand new Asus NUC. After eight years with Macs, it was quite a shock…
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It was the second time this happened to me. The first time it just suddenly started working again before I’d done anything. Always a shock. I completely forget I can stream to my system with other apps. Roon has become essential to me.
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Thank you all for your help and advice. I am happy to report I’ve successfully updated my bios and installed the latest version of ROON on my ROCK. I’ll be tackling Tailscale installation tomorrow, but now I’m up to date I suspect that will be a breeze. Thank you again. This was a lot cheaper than buying a new NUC, just took your knowledge, kindness, willingness to share and assist. I really appreciate you all. Thank you. 
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roon nucleus one is on sale. why get anything else?
Well, in Australian dollars that’s still over $600. 10% is a fairly token sale price. A barebones 13i3 costs a bit less. In the end I spent less than $100 on a new 1T internal SSD - just because the thumb drives were a bit messy - and managed to update my BIOS to be able to install Tailscale. I now have ARC working. I’ll be more vigilant about dusting the NUC out in future, and hopefully I’ll get another year or so out of it.
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So useful to share the specs like this for comparison. I ran ROCK on a Intel NUC7 i7 BNH for a couple of years, 8GB and 256GB M.2 SSD, 500K+ files networked on a Synology NAS with default RAM. 3 zones, no DSP. All great, until I attempted to enable >~150K files, when it started choking, unusable. Later I cranked the NAS with 2x18GB DDR4 and 1TB SSD for cache, with little change.
Recently moved to run Roon on M1 Mac Mini, linked directly to a (“no b.s.”) 4xSSD in OWC Express 4M2 enclosure. 50K albums (well named, tagged and ordered) loaded np. Used daily as media machine with Chrome, VLC Player, Transmission, all running concurrently, and the performance is pushed, but acceptable speed and rarely failing. Was expecting to have to fork out for M4 mini, but super happy .. I’ve found a spec to match my needs.
NUC7 i7 BNH is for sale if interested. In NZ (and AUS mid Jan).
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Interesting. ROCK although very good, as a focused dedicated Server & OS package, it has a limitation of being largely constrained to a single CPU core per zone. As such, not a lot of point with the expensive multi-core NUCs unless you have lots of zones or a very high DSP requirement where the most powerful single core is needed.
That’s why for some really big libraries the recommendation is for a Windows OS running Roon Server. And will be the same with MacOS.
But these OS come with a much higher footprint & overhead, as a general purpose computing platform.
Here that OS manages the workload over the available hardware (CPU, RAM, swap space etc.) plus the recommended NUCs use low TDP CPUs, to minimize the cooling requirement and this limits single thread performance.
Some highend servers have developed custom BIOS & OS kernels just for this task, but they are expensive given the level of R&D involved.
Your Mac Mini now with Apple’s own silicon is a more advance processor architecture, better power handling & thermal management than Intel’s.
Would be interesting if there could be ‘ROCK for Mac’ release leveraging the Apple M silicon, but in a stripped down ‘just for Audio’ approach.
The OS has zero effect on whether RoonServer is single threaded or multithreaded. The limitation is not in Roon OS (which uses Linux, which is capable of multi core operation just fine) but in Roon Server, and that is the same on different OSes.
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My 7i5bnh will run Roon just fine if you install Debian and then Roon server on that. It actually also runs Roon fine in an lxc on Proxmox. I don’t use it for that currently - it runs Proxmox and a vm with Unifi OS and a couple little lxc services. Roon requires many fewer resources than I thought it did when I was running ROCK. I know what I’m doing is tinkering, but seems worth knowing.
Umm. If Roon Server is running as an application within an OS, it is benefiting from the underlying OS’s management of the hardware (CPU, RAM, etc), which Windows and MacOS is able to undertake.
There are many favours of Linux and different modules within the kernel. We have no insight into what is used and how RoonOS works as part of ROCK - apart from the comments made about its single thread per zone operation.
I did experience this when pushing a NUC5i3MYBE NUC to the max, as a 4-core CPU, a got playback with DSP (upconverting to max PCM, converting to DSD, EQ filters) all playing back on this entry-level NUC without issue.
See
I replaced my previous Roon Server (HP I7 Laptop) with a Nucleus One early this year. I copied my music files to a USB SSD hard drive that I already had. The Nucleus One has worked flawlessly so far. It never gets hot and I never hear the fan. I use Roon with room correction correction in two of my endpoints. You can access the Nucleus One for some administrative tasks via a web interface. I use Macs in my home and the hard drive connected to the Nucleus One plays well when interacting with with my home network. If you want a Roon server that is simple and trouble free, the Roon Nucleus is a great option.
Yes but if Roon Server is largely single threaded then those OS services won’t make it multi threaded.
In any case, Windows management of RAM or CPU isn’t better in any way.
Yes but we can safely assume that they won’t rip out the multithreading support from the Roon OS kernel. If they did, then they could’ve run a thread per zone, either.
There haven’t been any comments or experiences hinting that the database operations of Roon Server would magically be multithreaded on Windows.
So what? Is this somehow special on Windows? Can’t see any such comparison in your first link.
Don’t forget that the Linux and macOS builds where switched from Mono to .NET at some point. This definitely had some impact but it was long ago (though after your comparisons from 2019 in your first link) and has nothing to do with the threaded nature (or lack thereof) of Roon Server
Umm - and all we need is a management page for ROCK, with the CPU loads, network activity, RAM usage and CPU/board temps and there would be a better understanding all round.
… have nothing to do with …
Which is true but not limited to ROCK in any way
I always thought that the NUC/ROCK was a set up once and leave alone sort of approach. Simply a DIY alternative to a Nucleus and back then cheaper.
Why would I need to see stats like that if I am a music listener not a PC tinkerer.
If you’re headed towards rebuild territory might I suggest a fanless nuc? My house apparently has a lot of dust - large dogs, fireplace, etc - and even though the nuc running Roon lives in a server closet I’ve had to replace the fan three times over 4-5 years. All fans give specs on MTBF in hours - mean time before failure - so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since I leave the nuc on 24/7.
Since installing the board, RAM, and M2 in the fanless case, no worries! I check from time to time to see whether there’s any heat buildup and to dust the fins, but so far, so good.
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