Roon Nucleus Advantages

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

This is fully justified given the fact that the activated Turbo boost mode in the BIOS with a certain processor load leads to a sharp increase in the CPU frequency and, accordingly, a sharp increase in heat generation on the CPU crystal which requires a copper substrate with high thermal conductivity to remove the heat from a relatively small area of the CPU crystal. Such a copper substrate for contact with the CPU crystal is unfortunately absent both in the Nucleus and in the alternative fanless cases for the NUC.

We’ve spent a lot of time with copper the last few months.

It’s both heavy and expensive, while not being enough for the complete heat situation. The copper is great for heat absorption, but not so great at getting rid of the heat it accumulates. While it might work if we made the entire top of the case copper, adding the cost and weight to do that was not an option.

We found that certain alloys of aluminum were far more effective at solving the full heat situation and future Nucleus units will probably switch to that once we figure out some manufacturing problems.

In order to avoid troubles with the CPU I recommend that they turn off the Turbo boost mode in the BIOS. This is exactly what I did in my NUC although I use a massive copper substrate to quickly remove heat from the CPU crystal in my DIY fanless case.

As for turbo boost, even copper was not enough alone for our tests. It was able to maintain turbo boosted speeds for short periods of time, which is fine for restoring a crashed Chrome with 40 tabs, or doing a heavy operation in Photoshop, but not for doing convolution filters at DSD for the length of an symphony.

Adding a small fan to any copper large enough fixed that. Even blowing on it worked if the copper had enough surface area! But those are not valid solutions.