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.
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
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
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
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.
£100 is a fair chunk given how much Roon costs in the first place!
As I say if ROCK won’t work then just Core on either W10 (I have a spare licence) or some flavour of Linux most certainly will so I have no worries about getting it running one way out the other.
And yes, I fully appreciate what is and isn’t supported - I tinker a lot. I hold a full amateur radio licence and also do astrophotography both of which require and awful lot of trying to get stuff to work on computers so don’t mind a bit of faffing to sort this
As i mentioned above I do astrophotography which basically consists of standing outside on one of the three cloudless nights we get in the UK trying to get four or five bits of kit talking to each other that don’t want to ask while trying to gather 3 hours plus (and preferably 10+ hours) on a target you can’t see. Just aiming the telescope is tricky at first although there’s plenty of software to help.
Most of the time you’re just get a) cold and b) frustrated. Just occasionally it works and after spending another day or too with some niche software you end up with something like this.
Roon, MOCK etc will hopefully be a walk in the park in comparison. If nothing else it can be done indoors in the warm. Which reminds me. If I get this working I might invest in another mini pc of the same spec to run headless via rdp so it can be outside in the cold and I can be at my workstation :).
Just thought I’d point out that if you’re also going to subscribe to Tidal and/or Qobuz, then any albums from these streaming services that you add to your library will also count towards impacting system performance. That’s because the information about the albums ends up in the Roon database - and this beast requires an SSD (which I see you have) for best results.
