What in the world is your actual logical argument here? A lot of people still are buying because Roon continues selling the Nucleus based on the i3-7100U. It clearly meets or exceeds the minimum requirements. If you think that the Nucleus and its internals are inadequate, go ahead and argue that with Danny. See how that works out.
Regardless, the N100 benchmarks faster than i3-7100U in the Nucleus. That is a fair and useful comparison.
AJ
I’ve just picked up an i71185G passively cooled barebone machine from AliExpress.
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.
This wont be good for Roon Sales
Is there an exit timeline? I’m curious what impact it will have on existing Nucleus customers (if at all). e.g. parts , service etc.
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
But it should run Windows or Linux, shouldn’t it?
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.
It will, no problem.
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.
This news made me sad. :-\
been running it on a 2011 Mac Mini
Interesting! I currently run ubuntu server on an Intel NUC12WSHi7 in akasa fanless case. I didnt think of dietpi, I will have a look.
Roon will find a functioning alternative …
I used a normal Windows PC for running a Roon Server. 3 Reasons why i changed to Roon Rock on a Nuc12i3:
Sad news indeed. Currently mine is NUCi5BEH as ROCK. Possible that our smartphone can work as ROCK one day?
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).
This.
The NUC line is not dying, just leaving Intel. It’s a huge market, but not for Intel. Others will step in to support the needs of the market.
