Roon Core on an Intel based SBC?

Running to 3 endpoints simultaneously is no problem. I do that regularly (3xnegligible=negligible).

As you can see from the graphs above, upsampling to 32/768 PCM (a single-core operation in Roon) takes about 50% of a core.

I haven’t tried any convolution filters (the only filter I use regularly is volume-leveling), but I would expect that those would look similar.

FWIW, here are the benchmarks for the i3-5010U and the J4115. If you want to run multiple endpoints simultaneously, you probably want the 4-core J4115, rather than the 2-core i3.

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Undoubtably. There is the matter of the Realtek drivers, and having to deal with full-scale linux rather than something taylor-made that’s supported was my point point. Someone who knows what they’re doing (even a little bit) - as long as the price is OK, and you like what it brings (starting with fantastic electrical economy, as well as the pleasure of messing around), give the Odroid serious consideration. At the same time, if Roon is all you’re going to do with it and that you’re OK with spending a bit more, remember that an ODroid + case + PSU can be as expensive as a similarly configured NUC8i3

Wow! EU prices are expensive (VAT, I presume).

Odroid H2 + 16 GB dual channel RAM + 256GB NVMe SSD + case + power supply cost me just around $200.

OTOH, as you say, the NUC is officially supported, and you can run ROCK on it.

Indeed.

With the H2+ (not the H2 that I have), you need to install the Realtek drivers to get the ethernet to work. Those drivers are/will be in the Linux 5.9 kernel. So this is only a temporary impediment.

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That and importer margins, I’d guess - MSRP ex tax on the H2+ is 140 Euro. I’d suspect the insane UPU Chinese shipping tarif thing should apply to Europe as well, though it might not be as dysfunctional as it is with North America. In any case, someone’s taking a cut somewhere along the way.

Hardkernel is a South Korean company. They ship from a warehouse near the airport in Seoul. The last board I ordered from them took 37 hours from when it shipped to when it arrived on my doorstep in the US. With the time-zone difference, that’s same-day delivery :slight_smile: .

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I’ve gotten stuff from the China than from California.

Just FYI, I’ve been playing around with Convolution (FIR) filters, produced with DRC-FIR on a Raspberry Pi with a miniDSP Umik. The Unix workflow makes it trivial to produce convolution filters for all the required sample rates (44.1k, 48k, 88.2k, 96k and 192k).

The additional workload on the Odroid H2 is negligible (with or without the convolution filter enabled, 88.2kHz ≈ 20% of a core).

It’s really interesting what does and doesn’t entail a large CPU load in Roon.

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Hmm, wondering what does impact the processing.

Multiple simultaneous endpoints, I guess.

As long as the number of endpoints is less than the number of cores, it doesn’t matter (each seems to get its own core).

Resampling is definitely costly (see above).

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Very interesting thread - I’m wondering what the performance of Roon is like - for example scrolling through albums, Tidal integration etc. Is it smooth or laggy?

I have a “small” library (~1200 albums) + Qobuz. The UI seems perfectly responsive to me. No discernable lag in scrolling, conducting searches, using the “focus” feature, etc.

Perhap a larger library would be slower. But I doubt it. Total RAM usage is ~3GB (of the 16 I have installed), so the H2 is pretty darned far from being starved for resources.

Thanks for the reply.

I’ve decided I’ll go with the Roon recommended hardware for ROCK so I bought a second hand NUC8i7BEH with 8GB RAM, 128 GB SSD for $350 AUD delivered. I will install ROCK on this - it should work really well. I’ve been running Roon core as a Docker image on my Synology DS918+ NAS and it works OK but is a little laggy from time to time. Can’t wait to try it out!

Should be a noticeable improvement