M4 Mac Mini vs. ASUS NUC 13 Pro

Roon Software Discussion
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Hey everyone,

I’m trying to decide between an M4 Mac Mini and an ASUS NUC for running Roon Core, and I’d love to get your input.

Mac Mini I like the M4 Mac Mini for its design and performance, but being stuck with fixed configurations (or paying a lot to upgrade to 32GB RAM or a 1TB SSD) is a bit of a turn-off for me. Plus, I’m not thrilled about being locked into the same setup forever.

ASUS NUC: I’m looking at the ASUS NUC 13 Pro. I’d have gone for the NUC 14 Pro, but it doesn’t look like Roon ROCK supports it yet. I really like the flexibility of NUCs—you can upgrade RAM and storage down the line, which feels like a smarter option in the long run.

Right now, I’m running Roon on my Synology 1019+ NAS, with my library on NAS HDDs. I’m looking to upgrade to something better, ideally with the database on an M.2 NVMe SSD and my music library on a separate SSD or NVMe drive itself (if running Roon app on Windows or Linux directly) for better performance.

Appreciate any advice or experiences you can share—thanks!

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There are three NUC13 Pro, with i3, i5, and i7. The single thread rating doesn’t differ between them. This is the most important thing for Roon UI and database performance. The i5 and i7 have more cores, which helps with playing to many simultaneous Roon zones (like if you live in a castle), some very heavy-duty DSP (though an i3 should suffice for anything reasonable), and a bit with search. The effect of cache size depends a lot on the specific software, I doubt that it does much for Roon.

Therefore, you should be fine with an i3 for most uses. 8 GB RAM for up to 100k tracks, 16 should be more than you will ever need.

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From: Intel i3-1315U vs i5-1340P vs i7-1360P vs Apple M4 Pro 12 [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

As you can see, the M4 is faster in single thread performance. (Though it’s not as if a NUC13 is slow).

The smallest SDD in the M4 is more than enough for Roon and its database. If you don’t mind the cable, for local music you can attach an external SSD for much less money than the internal 1TB.

You should be just fine with 16 GB RAM unless your library size is enormous (like 500k+ tracks or so). The RAM size is less critical on macOS because it swaps, so you will never run out of RAM and just crash like the Roon OS in ROCK does. And the SSD is fast, so swapping to disk doesn’t incur a big speed penalty.

I think it mostly comes down to what you are most comfortable with. You can run other stuff on the Mac (like Roon extensions, HQPlayer or entirely different programs). You need to change some settings and do some (minimal) maintenance on the Mac. macOS isn’t very annoying IMO but as we have seen in the many recent threads about macOS 15, there is potential for complications with Roon after OS updates.

The ROCK takes care of itself more or less but you can only run Roon and have no insight into activity and performance metrics. (On the other hand, I never needed to have it on my ROCK)

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Depends on what’s your plan for future upgrade. I’d vote for NUC. As I have something similiar with 32 GB RAM and 512 GB for SSD for database. Haven’t had problem running at all running 24/7.

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Thanks, has anyone used both and/or moved from one to the other?

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There is one ongoing thread about the M4 as a Roon Server and several older ones of ROCK vs Mini. The search will turn them up. You’ll probably find that performance-wise one can be happy with either and it ends up being a preference for the other things.

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Then go for it. Use linux or windows.