Hi folks. I decided it was high time to replace my aging sonicTransporter i5 Gen 1 that has served faithfully as my Roon core for nearly nine years. I looked at various options, I was particularly enamored with the new M4 Mac Mini, but the release of NUCs based on 15th generation Intel Arrow Lake chips produced with TSMC’s 3nm process pushed me over the edge.
I went for a NUC 15 Pro Slim Kit (bare metal) with an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H** processor. Yes, I know that’s overkill but I want to use my DRC convolution filter with high-rate DSD which requires some heavy D2D lifting and I want it to last.
As you can see from the above datasheet this chip has 6 P-cores and 8 E-cores running at a base clock speed of 2.0GHz (5.1GHz Turbo) in a package with a TDP of only 28W! This represents a substantial step forward in thermal efficiency compared to its predecessor Meteor Lake. It supports DDR5-6400 RAM and PCIe Gen 5 storage (although of course if you take advantage of all that performance most of that thermal efficiency goes straight down the drain).
I settled for 2x16GB of Kingston FURY Impact DDR5-4800 RAM and a 1TB Kingston NV3 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. I chose DietPi over ROCK as I also need to run MinimServer, and I have experience with DietPi from owning a couple of Allo DigiOne renderers. It offers similar advantages to ROCK (minimalist, simple to manage) but is an open architecture. I really like it.
DietPi installation went without a hitch and Roon is running fine. As I have all my local files on a NAS the Roon database migration was really straightforward too. I haven’t gotten round to installing Minim yet but will report back if I encounter any issues. Performance is absolutely blistering compared to the old i5 and the fanless slim kit runs a lot cooler too. For under $650 I have a Roon core that smokes a Gen 13 i3-based Nucleus Titan at a small fraction of the price and will hopefully last me for many years.
** I have no doubt that a Core Ultra 5 225H would be more than sufficient and would have saved another couple of hundred dollars.
No issues with MinimServer installation so I now have both my go-to music servers running happily side by side and am still barely tickling the NUC from a load perspective. I will only be using one or the other at any one time anyway.
Excited to read about the coming developments from Intel. Lunar Lake (successor to the Meteor Lake mobile 9-15W U-processors) apparently takes another step forwards in efficiency by among other things moving to on-package memory (similar to Apple with their M-series SoCs). This increases memory bandwidth while reducing the need for additional cooling. Lunar Lake processors are targeted at ultra compact mobile solutions so we won’t see them in any NUCs.
Even more exciting however is Panther Lake, the successor to Lunar Lake. This builds on the previous two generations, essentially combining Arrow Lake (successor to the mid-range Meteor Lake 28W H-processors)'s performance improvements with Lunar Lake’s thermal efficiency improvements. In addition, manufacturing of these chips will be brought back in house and based on Intel’s 18A (2nm) process. Even more power and even better thermal efficiency! These should make even better Roon Core NUCs than the current Gen 15 processors. Can’t wait to see the specs when they get announced later this year.
I use DietPi on a NUC13 i3 and 32gb ram. Exclusively to host Roon server. I don’t even run HQplayer or anything like that. Runs very smoothly. Plenty of perf headroom!
That i7 model will be solid for a decade.
Wish I had a NOS dac to try those upsample filters; they just didn’t do much on my Schiit Gungnir which has its own upsampling filter scheme and seems quite sufficient.
Thanks Chris. No, I wasn’t aware of Cockpit but I’ll check it out. I have been managing DietPi from the command line, although I miss the simple graphical interface that Allo provided for their RPi-based DigiOne. Maybe Cockpit will give me something similar?
I have to say, I’ve been running Roon on a proxmox LXC recently, and that gives me the ability to set cores and memory and move it around between various machines - GMKtec K10 (13i9 with DDR5), HP elitedesk G4 8i7t, NUC 8i5, NUC 7i5, and even Ryzen 5900x. As long as memory is sufficient to give it headroom, 2 cores is plenty on all these machines. The only machine on which you notice sluggishness on is the 7i5. And the 7i5 can’t upsample to DSD256. I wish Roon was snappier in general - but I can say that the processor makes much less of a difference to user experience than I’d thought.