Added performance and power measurements of my Macbook Pro when used as a portable Roon rig.
Used wirelessly, no hickups or disturbances even at DSD128. To be clear, the lappy was on a table in my musicroom, only attached to the charger and the music library disk. It was streaming over 5Ghz WLAN to my wired Aries G1.
I’m quite impressed with its performance actually. 
@support: Is there a way you can build in an opt-in/opt-out collection of performance metrics from us users, so it is easy to show how various systems are performing? It may help a lot of Roon users to decide on their hardware purchases/adjustments. Plus it may even benefit you guys too.
Me? Opt-in
Added a couple of outdated MacMini’s. One Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz (Mid 2010) and one Core i5 2.3-2.9Ghz (Mid 2011)
Both perform well, the i5 as good as any NUC I’ve tried. Both of them has had their hard drives changed to SSD, and both have 8Gb of RAM. The Core 2 Duo will struggle when upsampling to DSD128 at the same time as adding files to library and such but in general, quite okay.
They were running the latest suitable OS from Apple.
Basically, I am ready to say that the Roon Team is overly cautious when it comes to hardware recommendations. Note though, that with these MacMini, I opted for the Roon Server, not the complete GUI.
Feel free to add performance and power consumption to the spreadsheet in the first post, if you feel it could benefit someone?
Mikael…slim is gonna get you for the Roon Server reference. 
Sorry Wiz, I don’t follow?
Just making a joke of it…I dont know why he finds it so potentially confusing. As I noted if it wasn’t a suitable option then Roon would not offer/support it.
Hi,
Adding my NUC7i7BNH (2C/4T, Intel Core i7 7567U 3.5-4.0Ghz) to the sheet, any tips on measuring power consumption?
thanks,
SLC
I just use a simple energymeter, usually easily available from your local retailer, such as this:
https://www.clasohlson.com/se/Elenergimätare/Pr364444000
@wizardofoz, Thanks! Now i see!
Just added an Intel NUC8i3BEH to the spreadsheet. Short summary is that it doesn’t seem to matter which NUC you choose as your Core, they all do very well and draw very reasonable amounts of power, Not to mention the relatively low cost!
They all seem do DSD128 upsampling at around 3x speed and PCM192 @ around 15x…
@jcat had excellent PCM upsampling speed with his NUC7i7 but DSD was similar to the other NUCs. Thanks for contributing, by the way!
As a side sample:
My Core Does 44.1 upsample to 192 at 33.7x, upsample to 352.8 at 21x, upsample to DSD128 at 8.1x, and upsample to DSD256 at 4x.
Core i7-4790k, 16 GB RAM. No overclock.
You 4th gen is faster than my 7th gen i7-7500U but mine is a laptop processor I can’t get above 4x for DSD128 then my TDP is a lot lower so some gains.
There are always trade-offs. Desktop CPUs basically crush mobile/laptop processors at the cost of higher energy/heat. While mine does run hotter, I also have better cooling in my case. And since I keep servers far away from the music, it can be big with lots of fans. 
Mines tiny and silent and was very reasonable cost. I don’t have any DSD files or bother upsampling these days so happy with mine.
Im running up a demo core with my NAS based 250K track lib on a MacMini i5 2011 and its only been running for about 30 mins but it sounds like its about to take off with fan on maximum as far as I can tel…3 of 4 cores for audio analysis. Dare not try to play anything just yet hahahah
its busy
Haha! I tried that a couple of weeks ago on my old MacMini i5… It took off and i’m still looking for it! 
Nah, it was a bit noisy and warm but settled just fine after analysis to being “not audible”, like most MacMinis.
I have added my i5-7600 (4C/4T) 3.5-4.1Ghz result to the spreadsheet.
I have messured both single/multi core results
44k upsampled to DSD512 1.2x/2.1x
44k upsampled to DSD256 1.9x/3.6x
44k upsampled to DSD128 2.8x/5.2x
44k upsampled to DSD64 3.8x/9.0x
44k upsampled to 705khz 5.8x
44k upsampled to 176khz 13.5x
44k upsampled to 176khz 18.0x
Power:
Idle 13.5
playing 44khz average 18W
playing DSD64 average 22W
Playing DSD512 average 37W
Well its been 4 days and my poor little 2011MM is about 25% thru 250K tracks with 2 cores processing. I just killed and have resumed my normal ROCK NUC combo.
Clearly for a new user its not going to be a realistic roon at its best experience
I think you had your library on a NAS, right? While convenient, i think it is a slower method than local drives when it comes to the audio analysis. My old ASUS Prime J3055C took about 48h to index and analyze my 120K track library when i tried that earlier.
I agree is is a cumbersome process, but the MM 2011 still makes a very good Core (if it has got an internal SSD) when it is running normally,
By my understanding, this (250K tracks) is a large, but not unheard of music collection. It’s big enough that you need to start thinking about the underlying technology, or pay someone to do that for you (both methods are valid, depending on your background & interest level).
How many terabytes of music is this? If you’re running gigabit Ethernet between your NAS and Mac Mini, please realize that it’s going to take about 2.5-3 hours per terabyte just to move the data across the wire, assuming that your NAS can saturate the network, and the Mac Mini can process fast enough. If you don’t have wired Ethernet in your permanent installation between the Mac Mini and the NAS, I’d recommend temporarily bringing them together to connect them (note: this may not be entirely trivial, probably easiest to collocate with your router as well).
Next question is determining the bottleneck: is your Mac Mini processing the music faster than it can fetch the music across the network, or the other way around? If your Mac Mini has an internal SSD, put as much music as you can there and time the processing (time per 100 gigabytes or terabyte); that should guide you in the right direction. Otherwise, try a Thunderbolt-attached SSD or fast hard disk if you have one handy.
Good luck (this is not always easy)!
@wizardofoz Well, you could speed things up by locally attaching the music drive, let Roon do it’s indexing… then when it’s finished, move and remap the drive so only the file paths need updating rather than downloading everything fresh. Or, you could build the database on a fast machine, and restore it to the slower one. Again, then only the paths will need updating. I always restore an old database on new installs, even if it’s a bit old, it’s better than starting completely blank every time, because in essence my music collection won’t have changed that much.
