Roon Rock or Roon Core for old PC

Tinkering
1

I’m currently running roon core on an old Dell laptop and the only complaint I have is that it’s slow. I’m building a new pc and want to put my old components (intel 5930k and nvidia 1080) into a fractal north case. I’ll be using a usb connection to my dac because the wireless in my house isn’t that good, and will get a ddc in the near future. I’m not sure if I should set it up as a rock or a core though and am would like some advice.

2

@Anthony_Maisano, welcome to the Community. A fellow user here, but a Roon Core can be a Windows 10/11 PC, MacOS or Linux, or a RoonOS device, using the all-in-one Nucleus or Nucleus Plus from Roon directly, or a ROCK implementation using Intel’s NUC system. Supported NUCs from Roon are:

Intel NUCs are very specific configurations manufactured by Intel, and they are not designed to be DIY-assembled from different components.

Since you have an i7 CPU and a good NVIDIA-supported graphics card, it may be best to run your Core on either Windows 10 or 11 or by using Linux.

3

ROCK is locked down, you cannot load drivers, and only contains the drivers for the hardware of the specified Intel NUCs.

A 1080 is useless in a ROCK PC since there is no GUI, or even a command line interface.

4

I installed ROCK on a 10 year old i3 based PC with an SSD - worked fine with my 30k library

Since you (apparently) have nothing to lose and IMO it’s quite an interesting mini project, give it a go

I swapped back to using my Nucleus as the SQ overall was slightly better and the Nucleus is a far smaller overall package

5

If you use ROCK it will occupy the entire SSD it is put on. If that is OK try it.

6

Thanks, I’ll give it a go. I can always reformat and go to roon core if I have to. It will probably be a couple of months before I get around to it but I’ll post results and hopefully some pics in the forum once I do. I originally wanted to go with a small mini pc but anything with decent specs was more than I wanted to spend. I chose the fractal north case because it looks like furniture and would go nicely with the rest of my system.

7

If you haven’t got one already, I’d use a low capacity SATA SSD, 120gb are cheap now

Once you’ve proved it works (from HDD or USB) get a bigger SSD for your music