Hello,
Planning of purchasing NUC for my streaming box to the dac. I am relatively new to this scene and don’t want to spend big on streaming box just to get started. (Currently using 2018 Macbook Air)
Found a second hand NUC5I5RYK-NUC ( i5-5250U) Is this going to be good enough for ROCK?
If you are not going to be doing any heavy duty DSP or upsampling, that will be fine for the CPU.
Take a look at how much RAM it has and size of the disk. ROCK doesn’t need a lot, but you don’t want to come up short here. Roon has published minimal specifications (in the KB). It doesn’t take a lot for normal sized libraries and modest sample processing power.
Just to give you a sense of how much CPU is needed, I have a fairly old i7 computer (CAPS Zuma). I use DSP for room correction and I’m running at 50X to 90X what is needed. If I try to also convert to higher levels of DSD it drops down to 1.5X (1 is minimally recommended). Fortunately I don’t prefer the sound with DSD conversion so I have plenty of room to spare on the CPU side.
8GB RAM and 256 GB SSD and you have plenty.
Hello - that is exactly the model of NUC that I purchased almost 3 years ago, originally for Roon on Win10 and then subsequently with ROCK.
Admittedly, I don’t do much DSP or upsampling, and usually run only 1 zone, but the performance has been faultless.
Have a Roon Core running through ROCK on a NUC5i3 with 8GB RAM with a 240GB SATA SSD, it works fine with a NAS based library of circa 82k tracks/6,200 albums.
Use DSP to downconvert higher formats to DSD64 & 24/192 PCM appropriately. Have a number of zones but normally not simultaneously, however did try all of them (6) at once without issue.
So a NUC5i5 should be fine, unless you want to up convert to DSD512 (why this is necessary beats me, given that the file’s native format is going to be best, but some do, though I think because they can! 
)
Thank you for your answers!
I am not planning of using DSP (Feeding my headphone-DAC via USB). Alltrough my DAC does natively support up to DSD256, so it would be nice to use it sometimes. However, anykind of DSP is unnecessary since i don’t need the room correction etc. (If i undestand correctly what DSP is moslty used for)
I have read that some users have had kernel panics when used NVMe-ssd’s, so i guess it’s best to avoid these on this?.. If i manage to even make a deal on this NUC lol.
Thank you guys for your help! 
Don’t use NVMe for fifth generation NUC for ROCK.
Sorry for my earlier misinformation regarding DSP. I thought this was mainly used for room correction. Now after researching this topic quite a bit, i now understand that DSP is going to be major part about my Roon Rock setup. Sorry for my lack of knowledge.
It feels waste to create new topic on this but my question is:
I went ahead and ordered NUC8I3BEH NUC. This is 8gen i3-8109U CPU (More powerfull than the used i5 i was planning of ordering.)
Presumably, this is powerful enough to up-sample to DSD512 for my USB dac without an issue?
Again, sorry for my lack of knowledge in the earlier post. This is my first time building Roon Rock setup.
It should be OK with the parallelise function on so Roon uses more than one core for playback.
“parallelise function” ?
Not heard of this, please can you tell me where this setting is enabled?
Thanks
If you go into DSP - sample rate conversion it is there. Parallelise Sigma-Delta Modulator.
Ah, gotcha!
Thanks