I have moved my NUC back to Windows 10 and am running the Core there again. The performance is definitely better across the board. Discover and Overview load faster, not by much but enough to be perceptible. The DSP is performing better if the performance indicator is to be believed.
I havent had time to perform exhaustive testing which I would like to have done. But moving back to Windows has shown a big enough improvement that I am happy to leave it at that. YMMV of course.
Hi, may I join this thread? In a few days I’ll have my brand new NUC 8i3BEH (I bought the hardware suggested for a Rock only device, so 8gb Ram and 128 gb ssd).
Waiting for the hw to be delivered, I started to think to a dual purpose device, i.e. a NUC with Windows 10 running Roon and Plex Server, instead of having a simple Rock device.
What do you think? Pros? Cons?
At the moment my Plex server is running on a Synology DS918+, where I store the music, too.
Thanks.
My personal view is that ROCK is perfect if what you want is a fit-it-and-forget-it Roon appliance. I also do not doubt that it is the least resource hungry platform on which to run Roon Core. You will probably be able to support a larger library on ROCK than you would on Windows for instance, possibly with more end points.
However my experience has been that the NUC 8i3BEH running Windows 10 (1909) is more performant in terms of speed/responsiveness of the application as a whole. This maybe due to the core optimisations that have been implemented in Windows 10 since 1903.
In your scenario if you want to run anything beyond the Roon Core software you will need to use either Windows or a Linux distro you can configure yourself. This has the additional advantage of allowing you to tweak the OS for best performance/compatibility/security etc which you cant do with ROCK since it is totally locked down.
This is the way I run Roon.
I also use Plex and JShiver for movies.
I can use dbPoweramp for rips and BackBlaze for backups
The benefit by using WIN10 is that one has a complete media machine…
There is no SQ difference between ROCK or Roon under WIN10.
I doubt that, for running Roon on any modern CPU, that there are any performance considerations.
So my NUC (8i3, 8gb ram, 128gb ssd) will be able to handle W10 with Roon & Plex? 99,99% of times I won’t be using them together…:
I have used them together. Suitable music with a particular movie (sound off).
There should be no problem for an i3.
My Nuc8i3 runs RoonServer, HqPlayer for DSP and my son’s Minecraft server flawlessly 
with heavy DSP. Cpu load is 30% when playing
It has been pointed out to me that Roon recommend custom built Windows servers for largest libraries so this may not actually be true. It does beg the question though; how would ROCK compare with Windows on the exact same hardware in terms of library size?
In any case my library is never going to be big enough to find out so I wont lose too much sleep over it
Well, Windows has been optimized for operation on Intel chips for a quarter of a century! ROCK, on the other hand, is a stripped-down Unix, which is in general optimized for portability across platforms.
Is it easy to install Windows 10 on the NUC? (sorry, I’m more a Mac guy )
Download from Microsoft site.
Install by executing the install program in the resulting download.
If you want to keep it, go back to Microsoft and buy a license key, or not.
“buy a license key” I already have it 
Should I create a usb key, in order to install W10 and then run it on the NUC?
Yes you will need a bootable USB stick with the win 10 installation media on it. Make sure the nuc is configured for uefi, secure boot and usb boot. Then boot off the usb stick and install windows on your internal ssd
Bumping this thread as I’m currently considering the same question…Win 10 or ROCK on a NUC 8i3BEH. Has there been any further data, updates, or direction from Roon team?
What are you looking for?
Roon feels ROCK is the best way to run Roon on a NUC. But you can only run Roon. If you want to run more than just run Roon, run Windows.
This is a decision where you can’t make a bad choice. They both work, and work well.
Downsides? You have to purchase a Windows license and put up with Windows shenanigans. With ROCK, you have to build it yourself but it’s free.
Sorry about time I posted an update here.
The Roon team and specifically @danny have stated that ROCK is now the most performant platform on which to run Roon server (Nucleus aside I assume). Clearly I have no idea of the changes that have been implemented in ROCK 1.7 specifically but my experience has not been clear cut.
As I posted in the OP of this thread I was finding some differences with the apparent rendering performance between Windows 10 and ROCK when using the same DSP settings on the same tracks.
There is and was some debate about how reasonable it was to compare the two platforms in this fashion, but there was little else to use.
I tried to measure other differences between the two platforms. But it is not really possible to measure ROCK objectively so I was left making some guesstimations.
So it is important to say here that YMMV, I am not saying that my experience is objective in any way.
The tests that I tried to perform were as follows;
As suggested up this thread by others I tried to configure some onerous DSP settings to give the CPU a decent workout. I then ran the same setup on ROCK and Windows 10. I could only use the Roon rendering performance indicator in signal path as a measure. It consistently showed about a 10% difference, with Windows 10 giving the better multiplier.
I tried to time (effectively by hand!) things like switching between playing zones during playback, transferring playback between zones, starting playback of TIDAL streams ( local streams were near enough instantaneous on both platforms), changing DSP settings during playback and timing how long it took to restart. Bearing in mind the potentially large margin for error on these timing attempts, I again found a slight advantage in Windows.
UI performance. If there was a winner I think maybe ROCK took this by a nose. But of course much of this is dependent on the control platform. I used the same Windows 10 laptop in both scenarios.
Re-analysing the whole library (~20k tracks) after restoring a backup, which obviously I had to do a few times was definitely quicker in Windows, around the 10% mark again.
It is definitely possible I messed up some of these tests. The differences were not huge and the tests were hard to perform.
I have stuck with Windows because it suited me for other reasons than just performance. But I would say that if ROCK is indeed the better platform it was not an obvious difference.
Clearly if you want the set-it-and-forget-it appliance experience ROCK is the better option irrespective of performance.
Thanks for this update! I have an i5 NUC that I was considering installing ROCK on. The waiting times for the app to re-connect to the core each time I open the app just to adjust the volume or change a song is bothersome even though its just a few seconds, so I was hopeing ROCK could change that, but seems it probably can not… so saved me the trouble.
I don’t have experience with NUC, currently using Roon Server on my Win10 PC, but have an opinion.
I’m looking into moving to a NUC because I’ve had enough of Windows Updates / restarts / memory consumption issues, etc.
You’d have to configure Windows to login on boot if you want any sort of resilience through updates, which is somewhat non-standard.
I’d like to move to NUC to guarantee the device will be up and operational without worry. With such a small OS footprint updates should be few and far between, and when they come, be small and speedy to apply.
I completely agree with you.
In fact I should disclose right now that since I last posted on this thread I have moved back to ROCK again!
I work with Windows 10 all day every day and have 6 machines here at home running it. Frankly I could not be bothered with the hassle of managing/updating another one in order to run Roon server.
So I guess I have come to the conclusion that even if there is a small performance discrepancy here, I’m happy losing that 10% (if that is indeed what the difference is) to avoid another Windows install to feed and water.
Use the enterprise edition, only security updates