Intel NUC for Roon Rock

[Paul_Whittaker]

Hi guys,

I am toying with the idea of putting a NUC together so I can use my phone as a controller when my laptop is off (current core).

Now that intel 8th gen CPU’s are rolling out and the NUC line will be updated I think its a good time to get an older NUC for less.

Do you have any recommendations? I like the below but don’t know if its overkill.

Thanks

Paul

[wklie (Peter Lie)]

ROON ROCK with a linear power supply?

For those interested in Sbooster for NUC, please beware that its spec states output up to 36W, which should be more than sufficient for NUC7i5BNH (on the Sbooster support list). However, use of NUC7i7BNH (not on the Sbooster support list) plus a drive may be too close to the power output limit. Akasa fanless cases also support up to i5 only, not i7. So people not using a huge library and not using heavy DSP, and desiring to use a fanless case and/or LPS, are probably better off using NUC7i5BN…

[Geoff_Coupe]

The Skull Canyon NUC is not actually on the supported list of ROCK hardware. That said, I believe some folks have installed ROCK on it, search in the forums for their experiences…

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

the NUC7i7 is way better than the NUC6i7 – the NUC6 is faster, but it runs way hotter and noisier – and it’ll probably fail sooner due to those conditions.

[Paul_Whittaker]

Thanks Danny I think I will take your advice. Why do you not support the Skull canyon version?

[Huy_Nguyen]

My core is sitting on the NUC5i5 and it is running well. Even with DSP can still get 50-70x processing speed.

[Paul_Whittaker]

How does 50 - 70x translate to CPU percentage?

Thanks

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

@Paul_Whittaker

Why do you not support the Skull canyon version?

1. we never had one
2. it was a short lived weird item in their line-up… its the only quad core NUC ever.
3. it has overheating issues and can not run fanless (ever), so not ideal for audio
4. its expensive compared to the alternatives

It’s just the wrong product for ROCK. That’s not to say you cant use it or that it doesn’t fit your use case. It just was an outlier and if we are picking systems to support across thousands of installs, we want to get the biggest coverage without creating a ton of extra work.

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

@Paul_Whittaker

How does 50 - 70x translate to CPU percentage?

1x means that we are maxed out on cpu and we can only do 1x processing.
2x means that given how we are processing, we can do 2 streams like this one – so while 50% cpu usage is a good mapping, it’s not perfect because some items in the signal path can be handled by multiple cpus, many can not.

with the above logic, 50x would be 2% cpu (with the giant caveat mentioned above)

[Paul_Whittaker]

Thanks for both your replies.