I’m thinking of buying a mini PC with Windows 11 on which to install Roon Server permanently. I know that Roon has a specific Intel NUC distribution, but I love the simplicity (and freedom therefore NUCLEUS is not an option).
After some experiments on different HW decided that the Windows OS is the one that best suits my needs:
Silence
Low consumption
Sufficient power to run convolution or parametric filters
On paper the Geekom seem identical if not better than the Intel NUCs and the price seems much more convenient to me. Has anyone experimented with Roon on these PCs. Have you found any problems?
The HW I would like to buy is the following:
GEEKOM Mini IT13 Mini PC, NUC PC 13 i9-13900H (20 Threads, 24MB Cache, Max 5,40 GHz), 32GB + 2TB SSD
At the moment it costs around €800 compared to the €1200 needed for an almost equivalent NUC13.
If it runs windows and is => an i3, which it is, then it will work.
You don’t say how big your library is, or will be, that is the crucial factor in sizing up kit.
Actually the size of the library is not a problem. I intend. I have a 6TB Synology NAS though not all the space is used by multimedia files and from what I have been able to test so far it works well.
Maybe I should have been more specific. My main source is Tidal and there are a couple of issues in my listening room that I can’t resolve with panels cause my wife (Panels are ugly). My amplifier (Cambridge EVO 150) does not have Dyrac Live correction nor a Loop In interface. I will definitely change the amplifier in the future but for the moment I need EQ.
So, I got into Roon because EVO is Roon Ready and Roon has EQ.
An experienced person helped me with REW and together we tried to filter the audio with convolution curves. At the moment this solution works really well. The sound is good, not the best but good. The server machine is a 2016 DELL Precision, Intel XEON, 32 GB RAM, 512 MB NVlme SSD.
Unfortunately this old laptop has thermal problems. He’s always had them, so it’s not Roon’s fault. For this reason I am looking for a cheap but powerful enough HW where I can move the server.
When I say size of library I should have specified, number of tracks. Your device will be enough to run a large library, 100K+, it doesn’t matter whether the tracks are local or are on streaming. The number of tracks/albums is related to the number of links that roon builds up in the artist relationships etc.
If you had said I have 500k tracks, as some do, then you might need specialist equipment to run it on.
So to recap, I need a server machine to handle both tracks and EQ
According to what is reported in the GUI currently I have linked 37 Artists, approximately 1632 Tracks, 32 Composers.The NAS is not linked because I have almost everything duplicated on Tidal
I understand that the GEEKOM (the version with the I9 processor not the one with the I3) is not good, right?
Ok interesting. I currently run a NUC10i7FNH with ROCK. It is good but sometimes I wish it was snappier, and I was looking into a more powerful NUC. My library is fairly large (330k+ tracks).
Also, my NUC is in my office far away so noise is not a problem.
What NUC are you running?
PS: Mine’s a NUC10i7FNH + 250gb Samsung NVMe SSD + 32gb RAM + 4tb WD SSD (internal, for music).
