This is just a recommendation and I’m not sure where it should be filed. Moderators please feel free to put it somewhere else.
I run ROCK on an intel nuc7i5BNH. The nuc lives in an open shelved closet that houses the modem, hub, and router. All the equipment remains on all the time, but the nuc is the only piece of gear that has a fan. A fan left on continually eventually fails. Dust, dirt, and just mechanical failure kills them in the end.
After replacing two fans because the nuc was becoming noticeably noisier over time, I decided to change out the nuc chassis for a fanless one (I went with an Akasa Plato x7).
Definitely recommend this move to any nuc-builders out there. If you intend to leave your Roon nuc on all the time, go fanless!
My Rock NUC is from the same time frame, always on, even though I clean it once a year, it has never gotten dusty inside. Not having a fan does not mean that a fanless case remains dust free, btw.
Also, moving a ROCK NUC into a fanless case is creating a MOCK NUC ROCK build and not technically officially supported as the official ROCK support assumes temperatures controlled by a fan via the BIOS. The ROCK specifications are for the whole package not just the motherboard.
You must not have a dog in the house (smile). Both my fans were beginning to fail because of dust, despite the fact that the nuc was maybe five feet off the floor and in still air.
While I understand “unsupported” in relation to untested hardware or software mods, I’m not sure I grasp why fan vs. fanless would make any difference to Roon on the same supported motherboard. Roon isn’t going to help you in any way for a supported fanned nuc that overheated because the fan failed. As I understand it “supported” and “unsupported” for Roon basically means “we’ve tested it and it works” vs. “we can’t tell you whether it works or not - you’re on your own.” It’s not as though Roon offers some warranty for its software on someone else’s hardware.
Just for information, for the past 4 years I have been running ROCK on an early fanless NUC design by Aleutia.
I have had no problems whatsoever.
It is always on - running 24/7 actually located with a commercial RAID5 NAS that stores all my audio and media.
It’s the now sadly discontinued Aleutia R50, an i5 NUC that was arguably the nicest packaging for a NUC yet.
I’m not sure Roon have ever officially stated passively cooled NUCs are unsupported. I certainly sought assurances my i5 gen 5 NUC was supported before loading ROCK onto it. Akasa also do a lot of thermal testing and didn’t support some early NUC boards in their cases even though they fit. In particular gen 5 and 6 i7 boards. Gen 7 were supported.
There is also the fact that the NUC cases of that era were flawed because they have issues with dust build up. Blowing them out only provides temporary respite. You have to disassemble them to clean them properly.
I wonder if Roon could/would do the Nucleus passive cooling tweek? Probably not since that would make a fanless NUC a direct competitor to a Nucleus. Probably a dumb question.
There isn’t really any secret about the tweak, you can work out what was done. The gen 7 NUCs run at quite a high clock speed. The turbo mode only accounts for the last 10-15% of performance but accounts for the bulk of heat dissipation under load. The tweak is to go into the bios and disable that mode. The result is 85% of performance without a big step in heat output. You can still upsample to DSD512, perform room EQ and handle large libraries as advertised. However, to be clear the original question was about an i5 gen 7 so tweaking the bios shouldn’t be necessary.
When I moved this nuc7i5BNH to the new case, I flashed the bios to the most recent available. I’m not sure whether this setting was there before, but the bios has a fan speed setting for “fanless”. Does this solely control power to the (nonexistant) fan, or would it also tweak the clock speed?
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Torben_Rick
(Torben - A Dane living in Hamburg - Roon Lifer)
11
cirrus7 nimbini v4 - Pro Edition (headless)
Silent cooling through passive aluminium heat sink housing with copper cores
I don’t think it tweaks the clock speed (I might be wrong). The downside of ROCK is you are not able to monitor or control any aspect of performance like you might with other operating systems. But setting it to fanless is the correct setting anyway.
Agree! My i3 (running ROCK) fan started buzzing and I put it in an Akasa fanless case. It’s silent, cool and flawless. Also looks great. Such an elegant solution.
