This is the last of my haul of Intel i5 NUCs - which I bought as a job lot thinking they’d be useful to people here (as ROCK doesn’t run on the latest NUCs).
This is a 7th generation dual core i5 - so it’s about mid way in performance between an i3 Nucleus and the quad core i7 in the Nucleus Plus.
It’s in a new Akasa fanless case. The case is lower profile than the more common ‘Turing’ case so I expect it might fit better in come people’s Hi Fi racks. It certainly looks great! Cases for 7th generation NUCS are getting very hard to find - so it took me a while to find this. You see the difference in the photo below (next to an 8i5 in a ‘Turing’ case).
It came with a brand new power supply from Intel’s UK distributer, and a brand new Samsung 980 250Gb SSB. It has 16G of memory on two SIMMs which is best for performance - and way more than you need for ROCK
There is space in the case for an SSD to store media and I’m happy to install a drive if you’d like one - if you cover the cost.
I think this is a good very good NUC to run Rock unless you have a very large library - or want to do a lot of upsampling
I will sell for £450 plus postage (around £20 - the Akasa case is heavy) and the cost of an extra SSD if you want one. I’m not open to offers for at the moment.
I will ship with a fresh install of Rock, so this will be plug and play.
I’ve now helped a few Roon users get up and running with Rock - so happy to provide some support getting started if you need it.
Sorry for slightly unrelated question, but your post said “ROCK doesn’t run on the latest NUCs”. I’m in the process of sizing a roon server for my music collection and was planning on an i7 or even an i9 CPU. Is it the case that ROCK isn’t supported on the latest NUCs, or that it actually doesn’t work? Thank you.
Rock requires ‘legacy boot’ and the post 10th generation NUCs don’t support this. So you can’t even install ROCK on anything later than a 10th Generation NUC.
Of course you can run Linux or Windows and run Roon core.
Roon will probably support UEFI boot in a new ROCK version - but there is nothing announced yet.
So at this point if you want to run ROCK on an NUC - you need to find an older one.
Having built exactly the same fanless config earlier this year here in Sydney (NUC7i5 + Akasa Case) I can vouch for this being an absolute bargain and gives tremendous performance for the money - I noticed a huge uplift in clarity & dynamics compared to running Roon server on a NAS.
Boots into ROCK in seconds. Fast performance, rock solid (I usually just leave mine on and never crashes). Case runs cool during operation and you can throttle power in BIOS settings without noticing performance change - I run mine inside a cupboard.
Thanks for this @Eastcoast. Glad your experience is the same as mine. These fanless ROCK machines are just great. One of mine is also in a cupboard - and is usually cold to the touch.
Roon have done a great job with ROCK - fast, reliable and effortless to maintain.
If it is still for sale i would not hesitate to buy from Greg, i bought a machine from him a few weeks ago and it has been absolutely wonderful, quick, smooth and powerful.
Reporting back now I have the NUC installed and set up (it arrived very promptly, I was less prompt in setting it up
It’s lovely, it was packed beautifully and was just like Greg said.
It’s much smaller than I realised - 240mm wide, slightly less deep, 38mm high. Slots away very nicely, is very quiet and appears to draw little power when not in use, and not much when it is.
ROCK is snappy on it, and swapping an SSD in for the music took me 5 mins all in.
