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.
7 Likes
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
44
The Ars Technica article lists a number of the alternatives.
Back in 2015/2016 several people here were already using Gigabyte Brix boxes to run Windows or Linux and RoonServer. Mine from 2015 is still going strong. Always preferred Gigabyte motherboards to Intel’s anyway.
Why not, the market is full of alternatives now and has been for several years.
Hopefully Roon will use a different supplier for the Nucleus and make Rock run on more hardware.
The Nucleus is a luxury device aimed at a niche audience inside an already niche audience.
So many people running Rock on Nucs and Mocks already, Roon can fairly easily improve the ROCK distribution if they put some effort in and I hope they do. They get the monthly revenue as an incentive
No doubt there will continue to be plenty of alternatives to Intel’s NUC that will be able to run ROCK. The challenge for Roon is to find specific hardware or set of specs for hardware that can run ROCK and that they will support. Life was a lot simpler and less risky when all we had to do was look in the Roon Knowledge Base to find the supported NUC models and sufficient details on how to set it up.
Let us hope that Roon Labs will continue to offer Roon Rock, in the future for other well defined and easily available PC devices.
If not, an alternative for replacing a defective NUC might be Roon Server running under DietPi, a lightweight Linux that is available also for native PCs and therewith should run on any PC hardware of various format including formats similar to the NUCs. See
I would love to try a beta release (With latest Kernel) on arm for the https://www.khadas.com/edge2
Single core performance is slightly down, but across the board it has plenty of CPU power.
I also run Roon Core on Windows, and it works well enough. However, it is not flawless. Especially during Windows updates which reboot the computer – Roon Core does not start until the user logs in.
I think Roon Server starts automatically before the user logs in, but for some reason I preferred to uninstall that and just go with Roon Core (don’t remember now what the issue was).
Also, there is the need to manage another Windows PC (with anti virus, etc).
As others have pointed out, the Intel NUC reference design is what is going away, but others will pick up the mantel - it’s too popular of an option.
What Roon needs to do, @danny , is not just passively let this all happen without making a statement. Roon has a whole page on how to set up ROCK with a lot of recommended Intel NUC machines.
It’s important to get out in front of this now and:
Produce a page on their site that acknowledge the change in strategy from Intel
Install test a number of NUC-based machines from other vendors to make sure they install correctly and all the features work
Put up a page of supported/tested machines down to the model number, RAM size, etc
These things ideally need to be done within the next few weeks, or sales will quite realistically suffer. I’m speaking as an established CTO, btw - this is a massive, massive deal for a small company like Roon that lives and dies on it’s partnerships.
When it comes to the market: Perception is reality.
