so a question, please:
i’m using roon/tidal with my 10 yr old laptop…when surfing i’ll often get disruptions to my Tidal…i presume this is due to the older laptop processor not being able to handle the loads?
i am considering a nuc with an i5 chip.
How do you access the network with your laptop? Is it by WiFi?
often it’s attached by ethernet…but sometimes i will do wifi.
but either way i can still experience dropouts if i have too many tabs open
(esp in chrome…not as bad when using ms explorer).
btw: i was thinking of an i5 nuc to buy as i mostly use roon/tidal…despite having
700gb of ripped music (tidal is so convenient thru roon).
any particular i5 nuc i should look at that won’t get dated too soon?
(Danny thought an i5 would be good if i also want to try out some DSP
and sampling functions without going crazy…but maybe i should just step
up to an i7 nuc).
Best thing to do assuming you are using windows is to look at the performance tab and see what your processor, memory and network are doing. It should show you the last couple of minutes activity on graphs for each. Do what you normally do until it fails then take a look to see which of the resources saturated. It could be any one or a combination. As for an alternative solution I use an i5 with ROCK. Prior to ROCK it had Windows on and I was able to multi task quite happily on it with no interruption to Roon or anything else I was doing at the time. This was prior to DSP when I used Roon to deliver bit perfect audio from various formats. I now convert everything to 2xDSD which is managed with a fair bit of head room. I haven’t tried room correction yet but my microphone was delivered last week so that will be a project once my streamer build is complete.
thanks…i’ll check the performance tab, as suggested for a better deep dive.
btw any particular i5 or i7 nuc that you suggest? i just might pull the plug this wkend
and try my hand at it.
Simplest answer is any 7th gen Intel NUC will get the job done but one is low profile and won’t hold a HDD, it is M2 only. The other option is the same board but the case is bigger so a HDD/SSD can be added. I use a 5th gen NUC which works just fine too but the 7th gen should be marginally better performance wise but probably have a better thermal profile. An i7 may be overkill but if you have somewhere to put it where it won’t disturb the household it may be a good future proof solution. But for your needs I think an i5 will be fine.
simplest way is to just pick one of the ones they recommend.
https://kb.roonlabs.com/Roon_Optimized_Core_Kit
You can customize of course… 
many thanks everyone.