I’ve been reading along here for a while and often see discussions about Roon Core setups, ROCK, NUCs and long term stability.
Lately I’ve been testing a “fanless Roon Core setup” myself. Not an allinone server and no extra servicess, just focused on running Roon Core as quietly and predictably as possible…
Things I’m mainly looking at right now:
thermals during longer listening sessions
stability in 24/7 use
behavior after power loss (coming back up without manual steps)
I’m curious about the experiences here:
anyone running fanless longterm?
ROCK vs other setups, what has been the most “set and forget” for you?
any things you only ran into after months of use?
I’m still very much in a testing phase, so mostly learning and comparing. Interested to hear your thoughts.
It has been on 24/7 since I bought it in 2020. It’s never more than hand warm.
The library is average at 43k tracks (13k local) and I ran a convolution filter for a long time.
UI has always been snappy normally, with some of the occasional well-documented slowdowns when Roon decided to perform some background metadata updates at an inconvenient time, which could be annoying when it happened while I was editing. But then I left it alone for 5 minutes and drank a coffee, not a biggie. This should now be solved with the new background task scheduler that dropped in Early Access today. (Plus, I am convinced that leaving it on 24/7 always contributed to the slowdown annoyances being quite benign, because it had ample time for metadata updates - for people who only turn it on when they use it, all this background work necessarily would happen right then when they wanted to use it)
Without the convolution filter, the speed value is above 100x (and hence invisible in the signal path), with the convolution filter it’s still far in the “no problem” range, IIRC 20x even with 192/24 material. (I’m not sure about the exact value anymore because I have moved since and my new room doesn’t really scream it needs DSP, so I haven’t taken the time yet).
I have had maybe two or three power outages during that time, not been a problem.
The NUC10 (Comet Lake i5-10210U) was current when I bought it but wasn’t the smartest choice with regard to performance, because it’s the NUC generation with the worst single-core speed among the newer ones. (The NUC8 would also have been an option with Cirrus7, but I was new to Roon and didn’t know better). However, it actually turned out great for my needs because I have zero serious performance issues and the 10th gen has also the lowest power usage.
It has 16GB RAM, a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250GB for the OS and a Samsung 860 EVO 4TB as internal music drive. The 4TB cost as much as the rest of it together and so far I’m not even using 2TB of it, but when I configured it I liked the peace of mind by having always enough space without spending a further thought and by having more than enough spare replacement cells on the SSD. Same for the 16GB RAM, I would have been fine with 8 but it didn’t really matter, so why not, and it’s another thing giving peace of mind with Roon OS (as Roon OS crashes when it runs out of RAM).
Overall very happy and with how Roon is going (with noticeably more consistent UI performance for me over the past year), and given that I’m not an obsessive collector (I work my own path through the kinds of music I love and I like to listen to the same stuff over and over until I feel that I understand it), I see no reason why it wouldn’t serve me well for another 5 years.
Cirrus7 now has new models in the NUC13 range or something like that and I wouldn’t think twice about getting one if I needed it.
Your point about thermals and power behaviour being mostly about the surrounding choices rather than Roon itself matches what I’m seeing so far. Especially the idea that a fanless setup only works if the case and heat path are properly thought through.
Out of curiosity: did you ever run into long-term issues related to SSD wear or BIOS updates over the years, or did things remain fairly uneventful once it was dialled in?
The BIOS was updated on first install and never again, no SSD issues as far as I can tell (ROCK doesn’t provide any monitoring tools, but as my database uses something like 2% of the 250 GB, I trust the disk firmware has enough to play with, and I’ve never had a database corruption problem, fingers crossed. I’m diligent with backups in any case).
Overall, it’s been simply super reliable, I barely ever think about it being there (other than being somewhat obsessed with the Roon forum for other reasons).
Running a NUC 8i7 in the Akasa case here, with the same drive specs as Suedkiez, since late 2019. OS is ROCK, so it’s been as reliable as a rock 24/7.
But;
I think it just hiccuped a few minutes ago, playing 44.1/24 file with headroom adjustment, two procedural EQ filter sets (left & right speakers), plus resample to 768kHz. Speed was 1.4 at that point.
Edit- temperature is 32C right now with 96/24 file, no resample, speed 67.5, I think it’s cooling down, but I I need to put a new battery in my heat gun for another reading.
I need to check it out more because I used the 768kHz, as well as DSD a few days ago successfully, with speed about 4.5.
I’ve been running two roon setups using NUC 8i7s in Akasa cases for many years. The home setup currently uses a Plato case, the studio setup a Turing case. The Turing case has bigger heat syncs and handles higher TdP cpus.
My home setup has multiple (10) zones most using convolution filters for room correction. Rare for more than 3 zones to be active.
The ROCK is always cool when playing music.
The only problem I’ve had was when redownloading my entire library (30k tracks) to arc. This took a few days and hit the cpu very hard. I had a couple of thermal shutdowns on the Plato cased machine. I adjusted the bios setting and it was fine after that ( I was testing with Roon development so needed to re-do the arc download a couple of times).
I previously did this with the Turing cased machine which was fine.
In the instructions for later generation NUCs Akasa suggest some bios settings to reduce TDP when using the Plato case.
So I think at the limits you need to be careful and follow Akasa’s suggestions.
But with normal use you’ll likely to be far away from the thermal limits.
I have been running fanless machines since before the launch of ROCK. I began with Windows 10 which allowed me to monitor temperatures and gave me the confidence to use ROCK. When I upgraded that original 5th gen i5 to a 7th gen i7, it came from a Roon user in the standard fan cooled NUC enclosure and was misbehaving because the cooling had choked and resisted being blown out with compressed air. I re-housed it in a Plato case and used it until I retired it late last year. It was completely trouble free and would still make an excellent core, being the same hardware as the original Nucleus+. I’m in a fan assisted case now as it runs HQPlayer as well.
Regarding fanless machines these days, the gen 11 and upwards machines are massive overkill for Roon in its present form. As a consequence you can go into the bios and turn off Turbo mode or in later machines limit the TDP because Roon simply can’t use all the available power. You’ll find that it will still perform really well.
The people who would require all of the power and available cores are a tiny minority consisting of multichannel users, people with lots of endpoints working at the same time and people with huge libraries I think.
I should have mentioned that my Akasa case is the Turing model. I’m playing an 88.2kHZ/24 file this morning to two zones, one with the previously mentioned EQ, but without the resampling. Case temperature is 28C.