Ryzen or Core i7?

Roon Software Discussion
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I was going to order a new fanless PC from silentpc.com to run Roon on. 32GB (because having more RAM never hurt anything), CD drive for ripping new disks, and a RAID-5 array of hard disks for the tracks. A bit of overkill, apparently, but I want something that could be good for something other than Roon if necessary, even though I plan to just run a very stripped down Linux plus Roon Server. But is there any reason not to choose an AMD Ryzen instead of a Core i7?

(Oh, and if you can restrain yourselves, please don’t extoll the virtues of NUC’s and ROCK to me. Not going that way.)

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Roon devs have stated that single core performance is more important that multi-core performance. Intel still beats out AMD for single core. (E.g., look at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html and the first AMD Ryzen entry is #96 on the list.) If you aren’t doing any ‘heavy’ DSP Engine stuff in Roon, then that doesn’t really matter, however.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs have only really tested with Intel-based systems, as well. So if you run into some weird compatibility problem, it may take longer to get resolved.

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One of my winter time projects is to consolidate all the various machines I have into a ThreadRipper running multiple VMs.

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Roon runs fine on Ryzen. For audio analysis and the like having the extra cores is great.

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Not sure if it is still an issue but I had to turn off CPU core power saving as it caused hanging with Debian. Other than the Ryzen is flawless and very fast.