I am not a gamer but it resembles a gaming machine with a downgraded graphics card (for completely silent use) It was intended for my studio but I am moving my studio over the next year into a converted shipping container so its all separate from my house and living room. Most of the time it sits in standby and does nothing which feels like a waste.
My current Roonserver runs on a Cubi-N (Celeron 3050) NUC with 4GB ram and a 64GB SSD, running Linux 17.10 and a couple of USB hard drives hanging off of it – its been like this for a year and absolutely fine but I am wondering what advantages I might have with buying a couple of 4TB internal drives and migrating everything to the Ryzen Box?
My endpoints are various Raspberry Pis (Hifiberry Balanced Pro DAC into a pair of ICEPower 500W amps and B&W800 Speakers) plus my 3 x DIY RPi-Zero based WiFi headphone stands. My Ryzen motherboard has optical out so could go to a foo-foo DAC or just stick with the RPi endpoints as before?
I have about 2000 ripped CDs in FLAC – not too many HiRes files.
From a green perspective the Celeron is good enough to simply stream your music. If it has no performance issues I would leave it. The Ryzen machine will offer the potential for greater flexibility with upsampling and the like but you will have the complication of having to keep a Windows machine healthy. Even if I were to move to the Ryzen I would probably want Linux or even just ROCK on it.
I just built the same machine but with 32gb ram. It serves as the household’s only desktop workstation (running Arch Linux) but I’ve added a windows vm for those occasions I’m forced to boot windows to access Roon functionality not available on tablet platforms (not impressed being forced to buy and use windows for the first time in over 20 years, but Roon’s refusal to build a Linux client has left me no choice). Roon will definitely be snappier, but if you’re happy with your current setup’s performance is leave it be, otherwise if you switch to this as the server I’d definitely run Roon server on Linux - far less being harassed by constant is updates etc. and the day it stops working you can be sure it’s a hardware issue.
I am sticking with the Celeron. Its fine absolutely loads of power but in reality I don’t have any DSD512 files to take advantage of the power. I think I have a PC too many and will sell it. The main problem is for end user I don’t need that much power or storage as most of my music is stored in a cloud.
An interesting experiment but I am one of those people that probably could live with an iPad as my only computer.