Hi and would this work for Core hosting?

Thought I’d swing by and say hi. Downloaded Roon a couple of days ago because a few people I know had mentioned it and I thought I’d s what all the fuss was about.

I was rather hoping I wouldn’t like it but I really do so won’t be cancelling at the end of the 14 days. Really very well thought out software and runs everything seamlessly.

So, given I’m currently running the Core on my workstation I am looking at a mini pc to host it on because my main rig is barely the most efficient way of running the show!

With this in mind I have been looking at some ‘Amazon Refreshed’ mini pc’s with 4th gen i5’s - the 4590T to be precise - with 8gb and a 128gb sad (although I have a spare 256gb I could put in instead).

Would this have enough poke to run as a headless Core server? Be ideal I think in all other respects.

https://kb.roonlabs.com/Roon_Optimized_Core_Kit

Thank you for the link - Rock looks interesting. The question is will a 4th gen i5 perform as well as an 8th gen i3?

I’m looking at budget here and the i5 is a good £160 cheaper which given the entry cost of Roon itself is a significant saving.

This will give you an idea
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-4250U-vs-Intel-Core-i3-8100/m1787vs3942

Yes mate, what you posted will be absolutely fine with the caveat that if you ever wanted to some really heavy lifting like DSD upsampling then the beefier processors are recommended.

To give you context, I run my core on a 4 year old Celeron with a 90,000 track library.

1 Like

People run roon cores on all sorts of stuff.

Its really going to depend on a number of things that might change as you grow your setup.

Size of local library
Amount of tracks you add from streaming services
Number of endpoints you have and play to concurrently
DSP features you might want like convolution, upsampling, etc

what you are suggesting to buy is slightly above the minimum spec but the minimum spec is based on minimum needs too.

Sadly the OP is missing any details so no one is able to give a clear answer.

I have one of those mounted directly behind the monitor. While it’s perfectly fine doing nothing, that is what typical desktop systems are doing most of the time (even when used), believe me you don’t want to be anywhere near when it (accidentally) has some real work to do. The noise of the tiny fan(s) is HUGE.

Is this a thing for you? I don’t know (no details present in the OP).

Thanks all for your responses- I’ll have a mull one it all. I don’t use DSD and won’t be using the DSP at all - not my thing so I suspect this have enough grunt.

And yes, good point about fan noise on mini PC’s. We use them at work and there’s one that occasionally goes nuclear - sounds like a Vulcan on take off for those that have heard the infamous Vulcan roar :slight_smile:

1 Like

This is the only bit of your post I have an issue with.

It’s been shown time and again that Roon will run perfectly well on hardware below the published minimum spec for medium-large libraries that aren’t doing DSP or complicated zones.

1 Like

Your milage may vary depending on what I mentioned above. I can’t run my many endpoints and 275K track library that well on a i7 2014 macmini or even a NUC7i7BNH, instead using an i7-7700 16GB 256GB SSD ROCK/MOCK setup. yes the other 2 work but not as well as the beefier i7-7700 system. Ive tried on my NAS too…took over a month to incompletely scan and analyse my 275K track library on the same NAS so I gave up.

Of course one is free to use whatever you like…results will depend. I never said it wont work, just it will depend what demands you make of it as to how well it might perform, ie searches might be slow, or >DSD128 upsampling will not work well.

While that might be true and I may be one of the users with such an under spec’d Core, I would never advise others to buy hardware for a machine intended to run as Roon Core that not meets the published minimum requirements.
It was my decision to do so, based on my assessment of my needs and my risk analysis (What if it doesn’t work? Do I still have a use for the hardware or will it be just (a lot of) money wasted?). So I would surely not come here blaming anyone for giving be a bad advice or asking for a refund if things don’t work for me and I don’t want anyone coming here blaming me or asking me for a refund.

Thanks all

For a shade under £300 I’ve spec’d up a mini PC with a Ryzen 3 3200G, 8GB of ram and I have a 256gb SSD spare anyway.

It’ll certainly work for now - I don’t have a vast amount of locally stored music. It may not come across in my initial post as I am very new to Roon but have been building PC’s and tinkering way back to the days of having to swap jumpers around to tell the PC how much memory was onboard and write autoexec and init batch files to battle IRQ conflicts between mice and sound cards etc so understand the basic tech side of things :slight_smile:

I may try ROCK with it and if it does not just a basic install of W10 + Roon will do. And no - I won’t hold anyone but me responsible for my actions :slight_smile:

I think ROCK needs an intel CPU but haven’t seen anyone with a MOCK Ryzen yet…maybe someone knows of one? for a windows core no issue there I bet

I can’t think of any reason why ROCK wouldn’t work with a Ryzen chip - both are x86 after all but appreciate there may be subtle differences in drivers etc. Graphics in particular perhaps being an issue. One of those things though - I am happy to give it a go and if it doesn’t work there’s nothing lost.

Windows Core is running just dandy on my W10 Ryzen 5 2600 rig - no issues at all so can fall back to that if need be.

I’ve pushed the boat out as well and for £33 it seems worth getting an m.2 SSD :slight_smile:

It is true and you are :wink:

Personally, I would use a “Roon specified” NUC. There is no reason to go outside that IMHO.

One very good reason - cost! NUC isn’t anything particularly special or clever and I can spec an AMD equivalent for around £100 less.

If ROCK doesn’t work I’ll just stick some lightweight Linux distro on it and just run Core.

Good luck with that.

The official Roon Core device, the Roon Nucleus, is available for around £1,500 I guess. A self-made NUC system with ROCK is already a bargain IMHO. As ROCK is a stripped-down Linux optimized for running a Roon Core on supported Intel NUC hardware, you might find that some things wont work on an AMD based system but you’re free to try it.
Before you ask: No, I don’t know of specific things that wont work right away.

If there are no other needs and you just want to run Roon Server on that machine then I’m unsure if the £ 100 saving is worth the hassle.

Notes: ROCK on a supported NUC is fully supported by Roon Labs whereas MOCK builds belong to the #tinkering section of this forum and you may have to figure things out for yourself or with the help of the community should you run into problems with your setup. The costs for a working network and/or graphics adapter or a Windows license might easily eat-up the initial saving.

This write-up is not a general advice against your plans, it should just make you aware of some points you should include in your personal risk analysis if not already done so.