Hi.
Just to give people a bit of a personal experience running a new NUC.
The configuration is
BOXNUC5i7RYH (Dual Core Processor i7-5557U at 3.1GHz)
16GB KINGSTON SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (2 x 8GB)
INTEL® IRIS™ GRAPHICS HD 6100
1TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, SATA 6Gb/s
Win 8.1 Pro
Running headless and feeding a Meridian MS200 end point streaming into DSP8000SE speakers.
MacBook Pro used as a temporary remote, while an iPad Air2 is awaiting the iOS Roon App release.
I ended up choosing a box with a fan as I plan to move places later this year and will be hiding the NUC box inside a wall unit, so wanted to make sure it is safely cooled down. But currently it sits on the AV rack together with the MS200 in the listening room.
My collection is not huge, as I have deleted more than half of the albums I have not played in the last 3 years while transferring from Sooloos to Roon (assuming I could always use Tidal for 16/44 from the start), leaving all the high resolution of course. So that left me with around 1700 albums in the storage on NUC SSD.
The initial export was very fast, I did not track the actual timing, but important to note that the PC fan has never switched on during the process
Neither has it switched on in the last 3 days while I was listening to or adding more high-res content to the library.
That’s about it. I am extremely happy with the set-up. Did not expect the NUC to run so quiet (SSD is zero noise and the fan has never switched on even during the library import), so I think people looking for more expensive fan less solutions might consider having a look at my option.
The sound quality is just as good as my MS200 can send to the speakers, so Roon did an amazing job here given the relative low cost of the hardware (compared to the Sooloos).