Another Mac mini (M2 Pro non-dedicated) vs. NUC/Nucleus question

Roon Software Discussion
1

I’m new to Roon and my trial period is almost over. So far, Roon has been great.

I’m running Roon Core on a Mac Mini M2 Pro with 16GB of ram. My Mac Mini is not dedicated to running Roon Core. I also use this Mac for general computing and photo editing. My library has around 12.000 tracks, partly FLAC and partly Qobuz. When streaming a FLAC file, the CPU% peaks to 35%

My questions is if my M2 Pro has sufficient overhead to use Roon in combination with my other use or if I could benefit from using a dedicated NUC or Nucleus.

2

Hello Jeroen and first off welcome to the Roon community and well done on making it this far without any support requests.

The M2 Mac Mini should have plenty of headroom unless you are doing really heavy duty workloads while playing music.

With Roon you can use this M2 for the next year and then if you want to get a dedicated NUC, a cheap M1 Mac or a Nucleus then you can just copy the music and restore a backup and login to the new device and everything will be as it was. I have done this a few times myself as I moved from a windows PC to a Synology to a dedicated NUC over 2 year’s

But there is no need to get a dedicated server now.
Good luck with your Roon journey

3

I have no doubt that your M2 has the horsepower to run the roon server.

I my experience the main benefit of Nucleus/ ROCK is that it is maintenance free - and very reliable because it is dedicated to Roon.

4

I’m also fairly new to Roon (about a year now) and started with my windows notebook. Then decided to put up a NUC and don’t regret it. I can’t really spot any difference sound quality wise but the convenience of having this small machine always turned on, so quiet that I hardly remember it’s there, is a must have for me. In 10 months I haven’t had one single dropout or problem whatsoever. Just my experience. Cheers

5

None of us are saying don’t get a NUC or dedicated machine as both Greg and I have NUCs

We are just saying he doesn’t need it for now and his M2 Mac has more than enough power as it is

I will always keep a dedicated Roon server now for the sake of convenience, always on etc etc

6

I’ve been running Roon on a Mac mini M1 (16 GB RAM) for about a year. Like you, I also do other stuff on the same machine and haven’t had any problems running Roon. Other than the reasons mentioned above (convenience etc) I don’t think you’d experience any noticeable benefits with a NUC.

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I didn’t say that you were saying it :grinning: :grinning:. I was just highlighting the convenience factor. I think your advice was very wise. Cheers

1 Like
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That is very true you didn’t :grin:
I was shortening the conversation sorry by adding what I missed from my original response :face_with_peeking_eye:

9

Thank you for answering my question. I will stick with the M2 as my Roon Core, at least for now.