I have just purchased a NUC to install ROCK on. Before I did so, I did a bit of analysis of the relative costs vs performance of I7/Ultra 7 NUCs. Given the I’ve collated the information, I thought I’d share it here. The costs are those on Amazon UK site, for the lowest cost NUC of this generation with minimal RAM and Disk (generally 16GB RAM and either 512GB or 1TB Disk). You’ll need to factor in the cost of an external USB drive - or an additional internal SSD or NVME drive for your music files. The Prices are of course in Pounds. I assume the relative prices in other countries are similar. The GeekBench scores are for Single Core GeekBench 6.
There is quite a big jump in the Geekbench scores with the Series 15 models, without a similarly large jump in price, which is why I went with the NUC15 Ultra 7. But if the NUC11 is powerful enough for you, that’s a very good deal too.
Thanks for this, but readers should be aware that, as of this point in time, the NUC14 and NUC15 generations are not on the Roon Labs list of officially supported devices for ROCK…
@Alister_Sibbald
Nice overview. Good work!
I think that one can purchase the NUC11 i7 much cheaper second handed, which could make it the absolute winner, even for lager libraries.
It is also worth pointing out that any modern processor with P and E cores are massive overkill for Roon. AI capable machines with NPU’s and very capable iGPU’s are wasted. Memory above 16gb is largely pointless unless you have a huge collection. It is at a point where putting Roon on anything above a modern i3 is just, to paraphrase a recent U.K. Prime Minister, spaffing money up the wall.
The issue with a metric in pence per Geekbench points is twofold.
The only metric that is useful to Roon is single core performance.
You simply don’t need all those Geekbench points.
Roon will run on a couple of cores with hyperthreading like a boss. It genuinely doesn’t need any more and adding more only speeds up things like bulk analysis and makes heavy DSP a mostly fan less endeavour where before it would heat up the NUC.
Here is a suggestion. Add the NUC14 essential to the list and see how it compares using the original metric.
I’m very happy with the performance of my, back then, 200 Euro GMKtec NucBox G5. It’s quite a bit cheaper these days.
Intel Alder Lake N97 CPU, 12 gb of RAM and a 256 gb SSD. My music is stored on an USB powered 3 tb hard drive. Total library size including Qobuz and Tidal is about 115k tracks.
It’s pretty quick and very silent. I don’t really care for GeekBench scores. If ROCK can run my Roon nicely, then that’s good enough for me.
But it isn’t a NUC and so isn’t supported. I run on third party hardware too right now but my example bears no relevance to a topic that is specifically about Intel/Asus NUCs and ROCK. However the N150 powered 14 Essential should be supported at some point if not already, and should be considered the natural entry point for most users. The Barebone is £162 direct from Asus and it will be as capable as the original Nucleus+.
Was looking at GMKtec today too, after a friend spoke of them. Getting the power consumption as low as possible is a priority because I do want to run it 24/7 so it would be nice if it is efficient in idle.
Is it at all possible to schedule sleep using ROCK? I really don’t need it on overnight when it is not being used.
Was looking at models with 2 NVMEs since I still have a spare 2TB around and it would do nicely for a big part of the collection. And from my understanding the OS is reserved for the entire main NVME so I would lose a lot of storage if I were to use the included storage for that.
Was looking at devices with N100, 6850U and 7730U CPUs and I do not know which would be best suited. I don’t want it to be underpowered but being overpowered for it is a waste, and again power efficiency is top priority for me. If I do plan to use regular Linux and install Roon Core, I dont know if more options open up for my use (such as scheduling sleep for it etc, maybe?).
No it is not possible. But, then it is a database server and it is doing things in the background when you are not ‘using’ it. If you turn the server off, then all that maintenance will occur at startup.