Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions Daniel, it is appreciated. My collection is much more modest but I think the clarity helps other potential ROCK users.
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thank you for all your input to my question,i was thinking about a hassle free setup without windows o/s,ill use the original planned system i have nearly ready for roon core consting of windows 10,i7 skylake,16gig ram,m.2 nvme ssd for the roon core hope this will be good enough.
More than good enough, of course who knows in the future.
Russ
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I disagree that with over 100k collections you need a quad core i7 to perform well.
I have 200k+ on a i5 Haswell NUC gen 4 I think and with Roon 1.3 I have instant search.
I was disappointed before with 1.3 and was about to upgrade my NUC but with 1.3 I am satisfied.
The times it takes to do the initial scan and analyzing is annoying but not worth throwing money after.
I canât see why the number of tracks should have anything do with the number of CPU cores you need. Single threaded performance or higher clock is more important at least if you like me only have two zones and not many concurrent users searching the database. Two zones equals max two concurrent users and I donât see a point in upsampling to the kitchen bluesound speaker.
If I were upgrading I would look at the new i7 NUC 3.5 GHz (4 GHz turbo) when ROCK will support it. Donât care about Thunderbolt support by the way.
What I am trying to say is consider how you use Roon before throwing money at the problem.
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i will be the only user with just one zone i will try the upsampling to see if i like it
No you wonât only one zone here as well 
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my home system is 120k tracks on NUC6i5 w/ 4GB ram + .64GB ssd that sits mostly empty.
i fear the i7 heat in that Intel NUC case 
Iâm at 150000 tracks on an i5-6500 and plenty happy upsampling to 128 and at a pinch 256dsd on a single stream at 1.1X with no drops. This is running on a win10pro with jriver concurrently running and roon server. 2 x Dsd dacs directly connects USB with asio drivers, so minimalist Nuc i5 setup I would expect should cope fine. Core is ssd and 16gb ram giga eth and all music on a nas
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This might be a silly question⊠but when ROCK is released will it be easy to set up on a headless NUC? Will it need to be connected to display to configure? If it does, will the NUC need a graphics card installed ?
My understanding is that you flash a USB memory stick and plug it in and then it just happens ⊠I assume at some stage it needs to have the USB device removed, then all admin and control is via web interface or the control app
Graphics is onboard the NUC, not a seperate card.
It may be necessary to set the bios up, determine boot priorities etc so while it may work by simply plugging a USB stick in and firing it up in the future, I think it would be essential to have a keyboard and monitor the first time it is done.
You will need to answer 2/3 questions when installing (install/recover; choose disk to install to) and hit ENTER to reboot at the end.
Theoretically, you could do this blind (if you know your machine) â but when installing for the first time, a display+keyboard is advisable. A mouse could come in handy as well, if you need to make adjustments to the NUCâs visual BIOS.
Hmmm, thought it was an automatic install from a USB drive.
It isâŠbutâŠ
Youâll need to configure the BIOS on the NUC and Iâd highly recommend updating the BIOS to the most recent version. I received two i5 NUCs this week and both were two revs behind.
Youâll boot the NUC off a flash drive but you will need to answer a couple of questions so that the install goes to the correct drive. Since it was really important to some people to be able to use a second internal drive for music storage you have to tell the installer which one is which.
The NUC has a Display Port and HDMI output. Best option for a display is to use a spare input on your TV.
Speaking from a security point of view, I would never leave a machine in a state where a simple reboot would prompt a complete wipe of and reset of a machine if something bootable were in a USB slot. In my case the library my machine will refer to will be on the NUC. I would want it so I had to access the boot order or bios to enable a re-install.
Good deal alert
Is the bios updated from the ROCK flash drive?
Are you guys Running Windows or another operating system on the NUCâs until the ROCK is available ?
A NUC BIOS is updated by putting the .BIO file on a USB stick and choosing the update functionality at start-up. The NUC updates its BIOS autonomously â thereâs nothing for ROCK (or Roon) to do here.
I would use an empty key for updating the BIOS. If you have only one: wipe it clean, do the BIOS upgrade and flash the ROCK image to it afterwards.
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