I am a new Roon user (in the trial period). I went for the NUC8i5BEH, with 8GB high performance DDR, 256 GB EVO 970 nVME drive (overkill) and 1TB Crucial SSD. I wanted Roon ROCK, not Windows. The 1TB internal SSD is meant to be my primary music store. These components are the same as those used for this NUC Blog review of this NUC, though I arrived at them independently. (BTW, he has a NUC8i7 review up now.)
I did have some issues in getting everything going that I don’t understand. Perhaps there was a display issue? A cable issue? Some BIOS settings not saved properly? Maybe pushed F2 too many times or too much (yes, apparently that is thing!). Anyway…
In the end, things were basically working. In the BIOS, I set the processor power policy to “LOW” (which might mean the effective TDP is now 15W), enabled all four cores, set the primary temperature sensor to CPU and set the fan mode to “Quiet”.
When idle, the fan is off. When doing anything at all, even just one USB connection on the NUC serving 24-bit, 96KHz, the fan is on. It is not too loud - about twice the level of a disc in my OPPO UDP-205. The sound is not quite as smooth as that of the OPPO disc spinning, but close. I can certainly hear it 15 feet away in a quiet room if I pay attention. It gets only slightly louder serving 3 zones simultaneously: local USB DoP; Local HDMI 24-bit 192KHz and network to 24-Bit 96 KHz.
I intend keeping it in my primary listening room, serving my Benchmark DAC3 from the local USB port. I don’t really expect to be doing critical listening in the primary room while other zones also use it. I think I can live with the fan noise. If necessary, I can position the NUC behind some sound barrier and run a 16’ USB cable back to the DAC3. I’ve also been in touch with AKASA. They are investigating a future adaptation of the Plato X7 that could be used (the CPU location has moved from the NUC7iX boards).
I certainly have many teething problems ahead to get everything in the house running as I want, but that is it for this topic.
FWIW, here is the latest BIOS documentation as of the time of this post, but they have not revised it for the NUC8 series:
A few additional use notes over here: