I am considering building a dual Xeon music server (probably 2 x Xeon E5v3 12core + hyperthreading) which will manage my file library of about 140K tracks of mixture of CD quality and High Resolution.
What impact will the quality of the graphics card have on Roon Server speed.
I know it has to be OpenGL 3 compatible, but will a faster graphics card speed up my Roon experience on my 2 remote Roon systems (PCs)?
Will the 64bit version of Roon utilise all the cores/threads available on CPUs?
My apologies if this has already been asked. I couldn’t see it if it was.
Well Good News. No Graphic Card needed on the server, at least, in terms of running Roon Server. You can run the Roon Core Server which is headless and is managed by one of the remote installations. Yes, it is possible to have both a Server installation and a Remote installation on the same box. In that case, since the box will also be running a remote it would need to be OpenGL 3 compatible. I don’t think the devs suggest this type of installation though.
The graphic card in the server will have 0 impact on music playback or the functioning of the Remotes. The Remotes running Roon will need to be OpenGL 3 compatible, though. But, any recent Intel CPU with graphics will accommodate.
You have 2 different versions of roon. Roon and Roon Server.
Roon can be either a Core or a Remote, you select what you want when installing or running the software. This will need the graphics capabilities as you can use the GUI either in the Core or the Remotes.
Roon Server came after and is headless (no graphical interface), it can only be Core and has to be controlled by a remote (running full Roon or the Roon app on a mobile device). Since Roon Server doesn’t have a graphical interface, it won’t need any graphic card specs. It’s basically the full Roon minus the GUI.
Since I’m sometimes sitting at the PC that does Core for me, I have the full Roon version there as well instead of Roon Server, this way I don’t need to grab a remote to use it.
If I had a dedicated PC for running Roon core that I would never use directly and always through a remote, then I’d probably use Roon Server instead.
In your case I believe you tried installing the full Roon package as Core and that’s why it complained. Try installing Roon Server instead of the full Roon.
(I know, I know, we just have to get used to Roon’s naming of Core + Remote instead of Server + Client)
tldr - Full Roon does Core + Remote and has GUI, Roon Server does Core only and is headless (no graphics).
I normally suggest an i7 for a Roon server, maybe i5, depends on how much audio processing and how many simultaneous audio streams. That mini server seems a bit under powered. Let us know how it goes.
You don’t need graphics when you run Roon Server, but they are needed when you use the regular Roon as Roon Core.
I don’t know if it is smart to remove DirectX altogether, more programs can depend on it and it won’t harm playback anyway. Keep the server in a separate room and stream to a Roon Endpoint.
If you do not need the graphical driver for anything else. RoonServer does not have a graphical interface. However, if you are going to run Roon client on the same machine then you would want to keep the drivers.
