I bought a i7-8700T processor and upgraded the CPU of the NAS.
Wondering what the impact for Roon could be, I used 5 DACs simultaneous, playing different albums with each DAC upsampling to the max of its capabilities.
I measured the processing speed in Roon for each DAC with the i3 CPU and the i7 CPU. In my situation I see no difference in processing speed in Roon although the difference in CPU power. The i7 turbos to 3.6 MHz in my NAS.
As @Suedkiez says the Roon performance indicator is not very helpful unless it is reporting values of around 1 or lower. Id guess under normal loads, i.e. not triggering turbo boost or whatever, that these two CPUs’ performance is pretty similar on a single core.
Computing for generating a continuous stream is single-thread application per zone, and turbo burst does not really help in this case. Most of other operations roon is performing are also single-thread but burst means some short-term improvement. Some features are an exception to this rule like search queries with lasting demand of local computing which are utilizing all cores available at the time.
Benchmarks are showing some advantage of the aforementioned i7 for single-thread performance compared to the i3, but it is negligible (+20% faster but not sure is this is taking burst speed into account).
That is absolutely matching what roon expert are saying and what most people are reporting who were tinkering with different CPUs. There is a reason why in the original Nucleus and Nucleus+ you find pretty outdated dualcore and quadcore CPUs but with impressive single-thread performance given their age.
The litmus test for CPU-heavy operations in roon is anyways not playing a continuous stream even if it means crosscoding to high-frequency DSD. That is computing intense but somehow pre-defined, even my outdated 2017 Celeron could handle most of it. Differences in performance seem to be more obvious when it comes to handling very big and complicated libraries (>500k tracks, lots of unidentified albums, lots of references like in classical boxsets). If that is snappy and reactive, the system is fast.
This is a graphic from my NAS, showing the 6 cores / 12 theads, first idle, then starting Roon and adding 6 DACs. Then starting up-sampling all DACs to their max capabilities. After that, stopping the up-sampling for each
(the are other processes running on the NAS, but their where no changes in load)
