MOCK - Tell us what strange gear you've installed ROCK on!

[Mikael_Ollars]

Okay, here’s an attempt to find the sweetspot between performance and power consumption.

Housed in a Streacom FC5 Alpha chassi is an Asus ROG B360-I Gaming mini ITX motherboard. The processor is an Intel Core i3 8100 which is a quad core/single thread cpu running at 3.6Ghz. The memory modules are Hypex 2666Mhz DDR4, but at this time i can only run one (8Gb) due to the connectors on the NanoPSU… I am awaiting a couple more of those, and then i will resolder the connector “outwards” instead. Not showing is a Samsung EVO 970 NVMe m.2 startup disk.

Unfortunately i can’t seem to land ROCK on the NVMe? I do have ROCK on an SSD atm but since i’m not finished just yet with it i am running Win 10 on it to easily monitor temps and use it for some file management also. (Why on earth is it so much easier to remote a headless Windows machine with Remote Desktop, than it is to remote a headless Mac, from an iPad???)

Finished today is the hard drive rails with rubber bushings for mounting the WD Red 6Tb media drive:

Bought some L-profile aluminium from Bauhaus and some rubber grommets and hard drive bolts from eBay. Works perfectly, cannot hear the hard drive when started up!

Temps stay around 28°C-35°C in normal playback mode, no DSP. When analysing and adding my 150K track library simultaneously as upsampling some RedBook to DSD512 temps tis to about 70°C.

It works excellent as a Roon Core/Server, much quicker than my NUC8i3 running ROCK (with 4Tb internal SSD). And power consumption stays at around 15W when Analyze is done. (Pulls around 60W when running full throttle, analysing, adding and upsampling)

I will go back to ROCK later, but for now i will settle for Windooze!

Oh! I forgot to say, the psu is a 12V 5A brick originally used for my Bluesound Vault. That will be replaced by an external linear PSU also, but this works just fine!

[Cormac_Kehoe]

Are you still running this board? I have one and am considering MOCK-ing it. Has ROCK been updated to work with the Intel Ethernet chipset? I ask because it’s been 2 years.

[Henry_McLeod (Henry)]

I am using it, yes. The Ethernet started to work when Roon were alerted to that chipset needing drivers for the eighth gen NUC.

[Cormac_Kehoe]

Excellent!

[sasha_smiljanic]

Hi there,

Do you have an install guide for pc’s that are NOT intel nucs. I created a boot disk as per the instructions on the following link, but it does not work…

https://kb.roonlabs.com/ROCK_Install_Guide

I reviewed the section on bios update, but my pc is an office pc not a nuc. Asus motherboard older but updated bios.

Do you have instructions for trying to install ROCK on a regular pc?

Thanks for your help

[Ratbert]

Rock is designed specifically for the Intel NUC so there are no instructions from Roonlabs for installing it on a standard pc, you could install Windows and then download the appropriate version of Roon.
Some people have managed to get Rock running on a pc, try searching the forum for Mock.

[ged_hickman1]

MOCK - Tell us what strange gear you've installed ROCK on!

This discussion needs to be prefaced by the words from the Roon KB: Will ROCK run on my existing hardware? How about this other hardware? We have only tested with the above mentioned NUCs. It may work with other machines, but the drivers needed may not exist there. Try it out and let us know. We can not comment on whether any different hardware will work, as we have not tested it. We will not make any guesses, educated as they might be. If you do manage to get it to run, that’s great, but we…

[Henry_McLeod (Henry)]

The mechanisms required are the same. But key strokes required to access bios, determine boot priority and ensure legacy bios and USB settings will differ between differing makes and models of PC. Google will tell you what you need to know, and the Roon NUC guide will tell you what you need to do. You need to work out how!

[dannybgoode]

Not particularly strange but it’s good to know it works - I have it installed on a Ryzen 3 3200G on a microATX ASRock motherboard in a small form ASRock case. The only faff was working out how to get the bios to boot in legacy mode but once that hurdle was overcome it was up and running in a few minutes. Honestly I was expecting a battle to get ROCK installed but it just went straight on without any issues at all.

100% stable - had ROCK running for 30 odd days without a re-boot until I tripped the power to the house as a whole and it’s been running for 20 days since then uninterrupted.

Other components are 8gb RAM, a Samsung 860 250gb SSD and a nice big slow spinning Noctua fan. Runs perfectly and is very quiet although I still have it out of the music room anyway.

All in cost was around £300 so decent value too even compared to an i3 NUC.

[janusz_smal (janusz)]

Anyone try if is even possible to run Roon server or Roon rock from USB???
Thanks

[wizardofoz (Mr Fix It aka The Wiz)]

No doubt would result in a few hours of your life you will never get back,I wouldn’t bother.

[Henry_McLeod (Henry)]

The install script specifically looks for a HDD to install on. It won’t make USB, SD card, or on board memory selectable for install. That said, it is almost certainly possible to side load it onto any drive using cloning software. But I suspect any subsequent update would fail.

[Simon_Chick]

I’m not sure if this qualifies as “strange” but I just succeeded, in a surprisingly straightforward process, to install ROCK on a fanless quite old PC with just a mini motherboard including an mSATA SSD, but no other hardware at all.

It had been my Roon Core running Win10, but the mSATA died. Rather than attempt to reload Windows and get it re-registered I thought I would try ROCK.

Carefully following the KB guide, with slight adaptations for non-NUC equipment, it just worked. There was a bit more rebooting than the KB guide seemed to indicate, finding access to the folder for the codecs was not as easy or clear as the KB implies, and the database restore took about 9 hours I think (I was asleep when it finished), but it is over 20GB for 185,000 or so files so fair enough, and above all the restore process worked perfectly.

I did the codec installation after the restore, as I struggled before that to find the folder access (not enough rebooting I think), but it would already playback music files from the NAS before the codecs’ installation, however Live Radio failed until they were installed.

Really impressed with ROCK, and how it removes any system admin for the box running it. I am not aware of any shortcomings in the database performance, which seems as fine as it was under Win10 with the same hardware, except the failed mSATA was only 80GB as well as being about 10 years old.

I am still disappointed with the lack of flexible options for Roon’s interface, among other things, brought home by a temporary return to JRiver while waiting a new mSATA, but I was still mighty delighted when Roon was back in operation. I had especially missed the album and artist profiles. As for ROCK, I have no reservations at all in applauding it.

For the record the hardware used is
Fanless heatsink case
Asus H81T mini-ITX motherboard, updated to last BIOS revision (from 2016!)
i5-4570T CPU 2.9GHz
2 x 8GB RAM DDR3-1600
128GB SHARK mSATA SSD

[Mikael_Ollars]

I just bought a second hand computer from my local “recyclery”. They sell used computers from the municipality in my town here in Sweden at very reasonable cost.
I gave €200 for the Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF and got a Samsung 970 EVO Plus m.2 NVMe drive and a couple of 8Gb Cruzer DDR4 RAM sticks (not necessary, there was already one 8Gb RAM stick installed)
I installed the m.2 disk and RAM and then it took the whole of three minutes to boot from an existing Roon USB install drive, and then install ROCK!
When Roon was running I shut the PC down and installed my WD Red 6Tb media drive in place of the Dells original Hynix 128Gb SSD. Unfortunately I needed to initialize the 6Tb drive from ROCK’s GUI, even though it was formatted with ETX4FS previously. Something to do with keeping the ROCK experience seamless and appliance-like I was told.

However, once initialized it was an effortless task of connecting to the ROCK server from a Windows 10 machine holding a copy of my media library. A couple of minutes spent on a robocopy script (and turning Roon Server off from ROCKs GUI) and copying was on its way. It took 15 hours to copy almost 5Tb of media over 1Gbps Ethernet.

This morning I started Roon Server and then restored a backup of my database.
A small adjustment of the Storage paths had to be made but identification and analysis went smoothly.

At lunchtime today I had a running ROCK server with an Intel Core i5 6500, 16Gb RAM, 250Gb PCIe m.2 boot drive, 6Tb media drive and a built in optical drive for ripping! It works great and punches really well as a host for 150K tracks and around 11K albums in various resolutions.

Performance figures shows upsampling of RedBook to 24/192 at 50x processing speed, to DSD128 at around 8x and to DSD512 at 2.2x processing speed.
It is nearly quiet, except when ripping, and draws around 15W when idling and about 25W when upsampling to DSD128.

In short, an excellent Roon Server and ripper at very low cost!
Oh, I added its data to the Performance Matrix linked in this post:

Performance Matrix Roon Server

I know there are recommendations available for chosing hardware, but there are quite few performance reports from real world examples. Are there more people than me who wants to know what they can expect from, say, a Gen 6 i5 NUC running ROCK compared to an older PC with an Intel Core i5 3470? If so i suggest that we create a matrix within a limited set of boundaries to keep it simple and reasonably comparable and understandable. The only way i know of getting performance figures out of roon is…

[kentishman (Martin Evans)]

It’s gonna freeze a hell of a lot.

[VinceC]

…owwww…
I think when it’s done it will be really cool.

[Billy_McSkintos]

Adding my successful install on Lenov m92p tiny.

ROCK on Lenovo ThinkCentre M92p tiny - Successful

Posting to document successful install of ROCK on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M92p tiny desktop. Really no problems. Configured the BIOS, booted to USB, install and away i go.It is not fan-less but it is reasonably quiet and resides in a network/tech closet anyway. I don’t recall all the specs but the basics are: Either 4 or 8GB of RAM 3rd generation Intel® Core™ i5-3470T processor (2.90GHz, 3MB Cache) 120 GB Samsung 840 SSD [Lenovo-ThinkCentre-M92p-Tiny-2.9GHz-i5-MT-M3238-A46]

[Billy_Shen]

How can I add new firmware files to ROCK and activate a Broadcom wi-fi chips?

As it is Linux based OS I think it is possible to add new firmware files like BIN, Config files into the system disk with SATA to USB reader.

[Billy_Shen]

Yes, It Seems like that any x86 pc is available to ROCK as long as the BIOS supports Legacy boot.

[Andreas_Philipp1]

Well, these are the kind of things where I think why wrestle with a closed-down system which does what it has been designed and configured for, but not more nor less. That’s the kind of things where a multi-purpose OS like Ubuntu Linux is so much easier and more configurable. That’s the main difference between ROCK and a multi-purpose Linux distro you asked about on another thread.