Best used NUC for ROCK 2022/2023?

Yes, a NUC7 or NUC8 (but with higher TPW) will be sufficient for 99% of Roon users.

Potentially you could upgrade the RAM to 8GB (16GB is totally over-spec’ing) and the SSD to an NVMe PCI Gen 3 (such as a Samsung 970 Pro) for faster accessing of the Roon Core database.

Are you planning to add an internal drive on the SATA port, an external USB-connected drive or a networked drive for the music library? Obviously the first two give faster performance but will still be limited by the speed of the disk (SSD or HDD). Networked drives are limited by the speed of NAS unit - so overall performance is always an I/O issue over raw CPU processing.

I posted a comparison table of the CPU benchmark figures for the common NUCs used for ROCK here NUC 8th Gen still the best option? and best retailers? - #33 by simon_pepper - the most important number is the single thread performance.
Figures for the NUC7i5BNH with the i5-7260U CPU, NUC6i5SYH with the i5-6260U and for the NUC8i5BEH CPU with the i5-8259U CPU are here

So your NUC7i5BNH is better spec than a Nucleus, particularly with an 8GB and faster SSD upgrade, at a fraction of the cost.

BTW I ran a NUC5i3MYHE from 2017 to recently with a library of circa 90k tracks, and it was able to support multiple simultaneous zones with Convolution DSP filters and with upconverting/downconverting DSP, including PCM → DSD128 without issue.
I only upgraded to a NUC7i7DNKE as one came available for sensible money.

Let us know how you find ROCK performs on the NUC7i5BNH

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