Just a bit of an observation … in the UK at least the Core (i3, i5 etc) NUCs tend to keep value pretty well and whilst available used there’s not that many on eBay.
One thing that there are lots of are ex-corporate laptops - these are typically 2-4 years old, might be a little battered (eg battery useless) but do have most of the same internals as a NUC - same CPU, RAM, storage and importantly an Intel NIC.
I had a Lenovo Thinkpad T450s available - i5, 12GB RAM and an SSD… it’s Broadwell era so about the same as a NUC5. These are less than £100 on ebay (the smaller X250 very similar). HP (elitebook) and Dell (lattitude 7 series) offer very similar.
I tried first on a clean, patched install of the latest Win 10 pro - i’d already upped the SSD to a 1TB Samsung 840, scanned my library (~50k tracks) and let it settle. Idle power was +/- 7 watts, barely rising when playing to my Nova over the LAN. This is lid-closed so the screen off. I’ve disabled all unused hardware in the BIOS (WWAN card, WAN, bluetooth, fingerprint sensor, camera etc).
I’ve now installed ROCK - same process etc. The only stumble was despite the inbuilt keyboard I needed to use a USB keyboard for setup (presumably roon removed the legacy keyboard driver).
Most interesting observation was power consumption. This is high 9s watts, so approx 50% higher than on Windows.
Everything seems to be working well. Previously I had the server on a basline Ubuntu build in a VMware vm but had the music stopping after 4-5 songs and it occasionally throwing errors when trying to start playback.
Ive had ROCK on all kinds of odd things. At work we bin lots of old HP thin clients. (fanless, low power devices with a small 16gb SSD built in and general dual or quad core processors.
I put ROCK on one of those and it ran absolutely fine! Didn’t get much chance to put it under any kind of pressure though. But would make an excellent Roon endpoint!
Power consumption may be a red herring. A fresh install of roon will still re-scan your entire library which may make power usage seem higher. Given time to settle you’d probably find it was ok.
Hi David - yeah, lots of dinky Lenovo/Dell boxes like the HP (Lenovo M73/M93 tiny iirc) - many will take a 2.5HDD as well as an M2 SSD,
The power numbers were idle - I made sure it has finished the inital and the deeper analysis scans. Was ~ 20W when hammering the scans on 4 threads, barely changed when at the lowest setting.
I probably will play with ROCK on vmware again at some point, but for now i’m happy with less than 10 watts.
Sadly no real way to see what my little machine is doing as ROCK doesn’t give us any view on resources. I kinda wish they’d put a small console or something in the web administration section to view CPU load etc.
If they did that, they wouldn’t sell the Nucleus+ product, given the majority of typical users would be able to run ROCK, manage their Library serve all of their zones with the Nucleus.
From what has been seen in the benchmarking, only some extreme DSP (upsampling to DSD256 and DSD512) takes the additional horespower, and for those with multiple zones used simultaneously.