I’m gearing up for Roon & HQ Player (hoping Discogs will be incorporated sometime soon).
Got the MicroRendu.
I’m trying to decide which PC I will use. My music is on a Synology NAS. I won’t be using the most demanding DSD filters of HQP. I’ll be using Ubuntu LTS or Ubuntu Studio.
At this point I narrowed my choice down to either a BRIX or a NUC, as specified below. I gather both should do fine, but any conformation of that is very welcome.
The other question is, which barebone to choose… the slightly more modern Skylake BRIX with DDR4/2133Mhz or the slightly faster i7-5557U that comes with the NUC. I plan to add to both 8gb memory and 128gb SSD.
I haven’t tried either of those units, but I’d be surprised to find any discernable performance difference between them when actually running Roon/HQP. Either will do a really good job of the task you’re describing. I use a dual core Haswell i7 BRIX (click avatar for system description) to an mR as NAA and it happily upsamples Redbook to 128DSD (closed filter, DSD5.2) all day long.CPU varies between 70-90%. There’s some fan noise so I keep it in another room.
If power or thermal load or fan noise aren’t distinguishing factors between them then I’d suggest going with the cheaper and spending the saving on some hi res files. If you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose strictly on performance I’d probably go with slightly faster RAM rather than a slightly faster i7 but the latter would be of more assistance if you did decide to engage in heftier upsampling in future.
