I have Roon running on an i7 7700 3.6Ghz with 24MB RAM. I also have Plex running on that machine which is a Win 10 Pro Dell XPS Tower living in my equipment closet. All media is on external USB3 drives. I feed my main system via USB into a Brooklyn DAC+ through the wall and into the cabinet of my listening/theater room. Potential noise of the machine is not an issue …
Been trying to understand the potential benefits of a ROCK NUC instead … It’s not very expensive all things considered and looked like a higher end i7 would be configured for ~$600.
I’ve had Roon core on an i5 NUC/WIN10 that also had JShiver and Plex running at the same time.
I currently have ROCK on an I3 NUC, just for sh*ts and giggles.
I can find no difference, except WIN10 is more versatile.
The main benefit of ROCK is also one of its disadvantages. A NUC running ROCK cannot run anything else but ROCK. It is a very reliable appliance though with no troublesome endless WIN 10 updates and AV software to deal with. It also cannot run Extensions without an external computer to run the Node.js software on.
You already have a powerful machine which, if I understand correctly, you can keep on all the time to act as a server. I don’t see what benefits a dedicated Roon server would bring, unless, I don’t know, you use Roon to stream to multiple rooms re-encoding the output on the fly, and you also use the same PC to do a gazillion other CPU and network-intensive tasks at the very same time.
What else do you use the PC for? Are you happy with Roon’s performance so far?
A dedicated, headless (no monitor or keyboard) machine like a NAS or a Rock can be useful if you can’t / don’t want to keep your main PC on all the times, but that doesn’t seem to be your case.
A NAS with a RAID setup can be useful because of the redundancy (of course you can set up RAID on a PC, too) - remember, RAID is redundancy, not backup, though.
Windows upgrades can be more annoying than those on a NAS or (I imagine but don’t know for certain) a Rock, but, at the end of the day, we are not talking about an enterprise-level server which needs 99.9999% of uptime.
Thanks All. This is super helpful … I was just thinking about what’s next. My current set-up works great and I can and do keep the machine running at all times as Plex serves multiple rooms and I use Roon through the house as well. Sounds like I’m good!