Is there a well-designed fanless NUC enclosure out there?

Audio Gear Talk
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But is a Quad core the best option when using Roon with no HQPlayer? If Roon uses a single core to run normally after analysis then one virtual core of an i7 NUC is more powerful than a single virtual core of a quad core chip. If you employ the parallelize function in Roon, if it only engages another core you are still potentially better of with the NUC i7. It is quite possible Roon isn’t optimised for the additional cores the same way HQP might be. I may be wrong but that is my impression.

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Yes, although, don’t forget that Roon will dedicate a core for each simultaneous audio stream.

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But is a Quad core the best option when using Roon with no HQPlayer? If Roon uses a single core to run normally after analysis then one virtual core of an i7 NUC is more powerful than a single virtual core of a quad core chip. If you employ the parallelize function in Roon, if it only engages another core you are still potentially better of with the NUC i7. It is quite possible Roon isn’t optimised for the additional cores the same way HQP might be. I may be wrong but that is my impression.

I have watched the load monitor on our sonicTransporter i7 and I can verify that, with parallelize enabled, Roon is using all 8 virtual cores effectively when upsampling to DSD512. Without parallelize enabled you peg one core and get dropouts.

Roon uses about 50% CPU load for upsampling to DSD512.

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I had an email exchange about just that with Larry recently. He’s looking into what it’d take and if it’d make sense for him.

If it pans out, which is a big if, there’d be the added bonus that even the smaller case might be able to house a 3,5" drive (and of course could take the thicker, 4TB, 2,5" drives) - assuming it’d be possible to properly power and decouple that, you’d have an essentially silent, powerful small box with up to 12 or 14TB of storage (not that that much storage is the best idea in the world without ECC or redundancy). It’d of course be bigger than Nucleus, and building into HDPlex cases is well into the “nerdy neighbourhood kid” side of the difficulty spectrum, but it could make for a well-finished, nice looking, and properly cooled DIY option (Larry’s smaller case is specced for 65W, the Nuc7i7 is 28w if I’m not mistaken, and that’s officially too much for an Akasa case :wink: ).

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