For my part, as a ROCK user for about 18 months, I agree with this. If you want to know this sort of detail, then maybe you are not part of the demographic that ROCK/Nucleus devices are aimed at.
However, I do think that ROCK devices and the Nucleus One should have some kind of basic temperature monitoring or overheating alert on the WebUI since dust is always a problem sooner or later with forced air cooling and a temperature alert would help many to avoid the situation where dust (or even inappropriate placement in places that are overly warm or have no air flow) causes the processor to get hot which will result in poorer performance and early failure.
Note: I know that many have put their NUC boards into fanless cases - in fact I did this myself about a year ago. However, my understanding is that ROCK installs do not have the correct thermal management for operation in fanless cases (unlike the fanless Nucleus devices) and so some care should be taken if this course is pursued because it can potentially lead to its own thermal issues.
For my part, when I moved to a fanless case, I also abandoned ROCK and started using Roon Server on DietPi (i64) instead because it gave me the ability to both control and monitor thermals. Roon Server on DietPi is somewhat more involved to setup involving a little more knowledge than ROCK and OS upgrades tend to be a manual operation (although automatic package updates are possible) but I believe that it is within the capabilities of most people - especially with the help available on the forum.
It’s excellent to see all the different approaches here. You reminded me I started on Ropieee. My attitude to spending money on Roon has largely come from starting out as a tinkerer in the RasPi space, and then moving on to other equipment as it became available. I’m not a geek with deep understanding of the systems. I enjoy following instructions and getting things to work, while not paying any money for them, at least directly. Ropieee was great, but did fail more often than my NUC has. That was more hardware issues with plugs dropping out than the software, which was well maintained by the developer - and probably still is. Apart from the dust issue, my ROCK has been going strong for about two years.
I use DSP all the time. A chunk of my library is from ripping my collection back in the 00s, and I like to pretend I can improve the quality of my old MP3s with upscaling. The need for that has largely been superseded by the library matching and playlist improvement function, which I love. With Sydney weather I expect one day when I’m not paying attention, my NUC will melt down and I’ll have to move on to something else, but hopefully not today.
With Sydney weather I expect one day when I’m not paying attention, my NUC will melt down and I’ll have to move on to something else, but hopefully not today.
if its any consolation I am in Johannesburg and we see temperatures up to mid 30’s quite commonly, my 4 yr old NUC sits on my desk in a non air con room , I’ll melt before the NUC I think
Coming from a virtualization background, I tend to run all my services around the house in VMs or containers. In my case Roon runs on an ASUS 12 x AMD Ryzen 5 5600H with 12 Cores and 64G RAM with Radeon Graphics. It also means that for a little more money I have a machine running Proxmox and hosting a lot of the services for the house. This I think is the most flexible way to run Roon. The Roon VM is running Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS configured with 4 cores and 6G of RAM and has been running well for me. If the machine fails It is easy enough to restore all the VMs from the nightly backups that happen. All my media is on a NAS running on an Ubuntu server with all my docker VMs for media management as well as Plex for media distribution around the house.
