Take a look at the official supported NUC list.
You’ll see that 5i3 and 6i3 are both on the list
I believe the Nucleus is a 7i3.
ROCK is very efficient.
My suggestion is to find a supported NUC on eBay that suits your budget.
OP here… Been now running ROCK on a NUC for 5 days or so, documenting some core findings here in case would be helpful for others who are wondering about the performance on various types of hardware:
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My new NUC is NUC11TNBi3 board inside a passively-cooled Akasa Newton CTN case. Went a bit overkill with RAM & SSD size since the costs of those were more or less insignificant: 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD. (Couldn’t find any 2nd hand passively cooled NUCs in EU, so went with the latest generation…)
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My library is ~6k albums, ~55k tracks – most of that from Qobuz & Tidal
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Browsing the library is about as fast as it was when I was using my 2017 iMac (Intel i5 quadcore) as the core
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Plenty of horsepower left for DSP: I can e.g. do upscaling conversion to DSD512, apply parametric EQ and the processing speed is still around 2x. Max PCM rate conversion & EQ runs at around 9-10x. Will be trying out room correction with convolution filters as well sometime soon, let’s see how that will fly with this setup…
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In normal use without DSP the case barely gets warm, and doesn’t really become hot even with the above-mentioned DSP running for a while
The setup has also been very reliable so far, although will need more days to estimate that properly. But pretty sure that wired connection (unlike on my iMac core) does indeed help in staying away from glitches…