I’m looking at new hardware possibilities, one of which is using a supported NUC but in a fanless case. I have seen some back and forth on these forums saying such a pairing may not be supported. Can we get some clarity on this? Specifically:-
Does RoonLabs support Roon OS installed on a NUC in a fanless case?
Would a support thread be moved to the tinkering category?
Does RoonOS as deployed in ROCK not have the same thermal management as a Nucleus?
Are there risks involved (assuming a quality well-known case is used)?
Adding my experience with ROCK in a standard case to what @Carl has said.
When the CPU fan and vents get too much dust, the NUC will simply shutdown if the temperature exceeds the over temperature threshold.
Moreover, after cleaning the fan assembly, I forgot to reconnect it to the mainboard, so for all intents a fanless NUC in the standard enclosure. The NUC powered down automatically again when temperatures reached the threshold. Unfortunately, the NMVe SSD did not survive.
The corollary of this is that a purpose built fanless case should be fine.
Right, I agree with this and also looking at the various posts in the forums it appears that there isn’t too much concern as long as the case is doing a good job at transferring the heat.
I do think that there still needs to be some clarity around the support of such a device and whether a fanless case would qualify a support request to be moved to the tinkering category. I have seen a number of posts recently that suggest that (maybe only part of) the moderation team would move these to tinkering. As we know there is very little chance of Roon Labs support staff providing support in that category and such a reclassification of a thread would almost certainly have a detrimental impact on the resolution.
Typically, it would only be moved there if hardware-related. But you’ll be in good hands in Tinkering with plenty of community members using a fanless NUC.
I’d say that @Rugby comments were in context to that topic and should not be taken as gospel.
It is true, it’s not an officially supported environment for ROCK, thus …
Pessimistically; Roon will offer no support, so it is moved to #tinkering
Pragmatically; Roon would help, it would only be moved if the issue was hardware related.
For example, questions such these …
ROCK core running on a supported NUC board in a fanless case, keeps overheating help?
ROCK core running on a supported NUC board in a fanless case, keeps shutting down, help?
… would be moved as there would be little added value from Roon support team.
The moderator’s typically have a pragmatic perspective … if a topic were to be moved and the OP thought it was the wrong call it can always be flagged for review. In which case the mods would discuss with Roon’s support team to determine how to proceed.
Personally, provided the passively cool case is well engineered and located in free air, I would foresee little risk for most peoples’ systems / use cases.
It’s not really a question I ever considered, actually…Whether it was supported or not. I stuck a used 8-series i5 NUC in a fanless case a couple years ago, added a bunch of RAM and haven’t thought about it since. Works flawlessly. Running ARC and convolutions in 3 rooms and a headphone zone. No brainer.
I put three operating systems, including ROCK, through their paces on a fanless sub-$300 PC (not NUC) with an added NVMe drive. The CPU was pegged when music analysis was turned on while cataloging music, but the hardware didn’t overheat and the system never throttled itself. During normal operation just playing music, system load was around 1%.
The more processing you make the NUC do , the more heat it will generate, so check out what DSP you are using etc
I have a 10i7 / 32 Gb RAM, the only time it makes even a whisper is when Audio Analysis is happening, you can help by setting the number of cores used to 1 say then just increase that to Max overnight when the fan noise doesn’t matter
BUT I have a single Zone and no DSP , I play literally one unadulterated album at a time. My library is around 130k tracks with very few additions these days so little analysis
It doesn’t really, it mentions something about DSP upsampling but nothing else. Also, just because you linked a secondary thread doesn’t mean that everyone reading this will go and read it in depth.
[Moderated]
Your statement “It doesn’t really [describe the test conditions] …” is not correct. The roon usage that caused 1% utilization was spelled out:
You did originally guess that
@Robem, roon neither upscales nor transcodes. It is not a video processing system. It decodes various digital audio formats to PCM or PWM and performs various digital signal processing tasks on the decoded data, such as the upsampling I tested.
My Cirrus7 Nimbini with a NUC 8i5 works great as a core for some years already (with 4TB SSD for storage of my music library), so I don‘t really mind whether it‘s supported or not
