I’m seriously considering building a fully custom fanless ROCK (or maybe Proxmox with Roon installed into a Linux guest?), using a standard motherboard, probably Mini-ITX, low-TDP CPU (definately under 65W).
I’ve just finished my workshop so I’m thinking a milled aluminium front, large heatsink on the top, milled copper plate connecting the “hot bits” of the motherboard to the heatsink and a bit of hardwood on there, thoughts?
So some questions:
I’m pretty sure I want a nice display on the front that will show what’s playing in the local zone, any advice here, stuff an RPi with attached display in there, or do something else?
Anything else I should put in the case?
Is there any point in having a discrete GPU or Google Coral in there?
I’ve (re)started my “research” on HQPlayer, just putting that on the table. I’m also toying with the idea of improving my room correction (currently using a SHD for this and it’s also splitting my stereo output to 2.2).
Anything other than ROCK will give you the opportunity to attach a budget HDMI display and use it as web display - and you could customize what and how that display shows, like so
Please post many photos if you go forward with this. If I understand correctly that you plan to mill your own case, I’m sure many of us would love to see photos and videos.
Based on your post, I can’t imagine you don’t know Akasa cases. That’s where I’d look for inspiration, especially for ideas around passive cooling. I’ve only done build with an Akasa case and that was the re-homing of an 11th gen NUC from the stock Intel case. Since the case is the radiator, you want to at least consider a direct connection between your heat sink and the case itself. I’d look at the installation docs of of the cases that look interesting and see how they’ve pulled it off: Newton NE2 | Fanless Case for Intel® NUC Compute Board (Garden Beach) & Compute Elements (U-Series) | Akasa Thermal Solution
@Marin_Weigel makes a good point about using a monitor connected via HDMI. Some monitors in the category you’d be looking at are powered via standard 5v USB which would allow you to connect directly to one of the USB heads on your board. The other option is 12v DC which you could probably pretty easily source from your power supply. Either way, I think this is probably a better option than a Pi jammed in the case.
Unfortunately, Roon has just one set of html/javascript files that drive not just the connected display but also any additional displays or Chromecast devices on your network. I’ve played with these files, similar to what @Marin_Weigel has done, and I’ve found it tricky to find a single strategy that works well for me. All that said, as much as I like the idea of a “Now Playing” screen, I’m not sure I’d be happy with it in my server case.
If you put something cool together, though, you could probably go into business selling them
You’re on the right track. You want to sink the heat into aluminum or copper. Convection is your friend and you’ll find plenty of discussion around designs to enhance cooling.
However… HQP won’t work in a passive case. HQP requires a lot, a lot a lot, of CPU power once you really get into the higher DSD rates (PCM not so much but where is the fun in that?). Where HQP hiccups is with thermal throttling. You might be fine at 3Ghz core clocks but as soon as the CPU thermal throttles to 2.2 HQP won’t be able to keep-up and the music skips. For this reason, you’ll want a fully active cooled HQP build… which… next point…
Much like ROCK HQP has something called “embedded”. It’s not for the unadventurous but is more of an appliance like ROCK. Of course that means ROCK on one bit of hardware and HQP on another. If you want to run both on same hardware you can’t run ROCK and you can’t run HQP embedded… So… next point…
I very much prefer putting Roon and HQP in another room. Then I don’t worry about noise and thermals. Build a little streamer with display and that’s easily passively cooled.
But, always post pics! Very interested to see what you come up with.
As @ipeverywhere knows I come from a slightly different direction. I believe in building powerful machines to run both software (RoonServer and HQP) on the same machine. I also think servers like these are meant for non-listening spaces, and as such, you can use whatever loud powerful hardware that you want.
Since, HQP might require the use of a NVIDIA Graphics Card’s CUDA processing for smooth operation, best to plan for what processing you might need and then worry about the details. I run a EVGA RTX 3080 to help with processing.
I have a lot of hardware, everything from Threadripper to RPi5 (including three Asaka cases). My background is IT, I’m very happy building servers and sticking Linux on them.
Maybe I’ll do a water-cooled server build and put it in the study. I need to keep the idle power low as I run the house on batteries most of the time, that rules out the Threadripper.
So based on your feedback I should do the custom case with display for the streamer, that doesn’t feel like much of a challenge though, couldn’t I just use my passively-cooled RPi4 with DSI LCD, the case could end up being a big bunch of empty?
HQP Can be turned on just when you want to use it. I boot mine from a USB stick and it boots in 90 seconds. Roon, obviously, needs to be on all the time.
RoPieee supports a native Raspberry display, so that is an easy option for a standalone display that works well for Roon and can be placed anywhere that makes sense in your setup.
That’s what I built. I used a fanless PC case from HD Plex, a thin mini ITX board, and an Intel i3-4170 CPU (3.7 GHz) from EBay. Windows 10 running headless. I use a Raspberry Pi with display and remote to show what’s playing. I wasn’t satisfied with a monitor. The RasPi runs Ropiee XL and provides some basic touch screen controls. You really don’t need much horsepower to run Roon. Mine is pretty minimal but anything at that level or faster should be fine. Linux on the PC was a bit of pain to deal with but would have been fine too.
