I’ve just picked up an i71185G passively cooled barebone machine from AliExpress.
It is costing me around £270 before tax and duty assuming I end up paying that. For an extra £40 it would have come with 8gb of memory and 256gb of storage. This is the sort of thing the NUC can’t compete with. Now I have no idea if it’ll load ROCK. I will let people know either way in the MOCK thread. And I don’t know if it will be long lived. It may die on me in six months. But for what it is costing it is a decent gamble IMO. There are literally hundreds of these things listed as being in stock. I do get that you are paying for a certain level of quality in the NUC hardware together with Roon support. But I can buy this, turn off its performance features and still have a machine way more powerful than a Nucleus+ whilst being more efficient as well.