There are three that I know of, with public pricing available.
The Akasa case range is one, and that’s from $80-$140, but the finish is a bit rough, and they’ll probably look better in a (well-ventilated…) closet. They might run a bit hot, and you can buy them pre-built from places like QuietPC.
The HDPlex is another, and that’s $215. The finish there should be better than with Akasa, but it’s also likely a bit more involved to build, and there’s no place I know of that sells them pre-built if you’re uncomfortable with doing it yourself. It’s also bigger (286x264x63.5mm vs 247.9 x 113.5 x 95mm). The upside of this is that it’s got more than ample capacity as far as cooling is concerned (it’s designed for chips that draw something like 2,5x more than the NUC8i7 does), plus it’s got space for both an internal power supply, and a 3,5" drive, so you could conceivably have 16 TB of storage in there). Because it isn’t NUC-generation specific, it’s also more likely to be upgradeable in the future.
Finally, there’s the Prime Mini, which is pre-built, comes with a design award, and adds around $400 to the cost of parts for the case + building. You’d have to add shipping and taxes from Switzerland to wherever you are, you’d still have to install ROCK on it, and the PSU is external.
You mentioned NAS in an earlier post. Let me tell you what I have. I bought a QNAP NAS TS-473. This is where your ROON digital music library will live (your music files go on this NAS). Tons of excellent videos for learning on youtube. I loaded up my NAS with 4 four TB hard drives and 64 GB of RAM and 2 Samsung M.2 SATA SSDs for Cache acceleration. I connected my NAS to my NetGear router using its SFP+ port for super fast ethernet. I bought a Mellanox PCIe card which allowed me to add SFP+ port to my NAS. NAS offers you what is called RAID levels. You can have 1 hard disk or even 2 of them die and you can reconstruct your lost files from information that is stored on the other good hard drives. It is a redundancy thing. Good luck --Tim
Have you already built your new core machine? If so, is there any improvement in sould quality?
As I unserstand you have a dedicated streamer or renderer and just using this PC for Roon Core, so it is not connected directly to a DAC or streamer via USB.
I have a similar system, I have a Lumin U1 streamer mini with LPS and it is isolated from the rest of my network with an Etherregen switch.
My Roon Core is on my NAS at the moment but my library is growing so I need a more powerful PC for the core.
I am hesitating between a “normal PC” or a fanless quiet one with LPS, just for the roon core. It will be in a different room, so the fan noise is not a problem in that regard.
But if the core is “isolated” with several switches, and the one before the streamer is an Etherregen, does it really make a difference if the core is on a “silent” PC?
In the last few months I have moved away from custom PC hardware. I have settled on the Antipodes CX+EX pair running Roon Core and Roon Bridge respectively. I am thinking about getting the EtherRegen.
I see…so I have to assume that the server makes a significant difference too, especially if connected directly to the streamer.
In my case the Etherregen did improve the sound quality quite a lot, so I recommend to everyone to try it. I think they offer 30-day money-back satisfaction guarantee…
There is a lot of research going on. Some have found that rather high power servers Xeon or higher end i7 processors running at 4ghz or more seem to help. There are a couple of HUGE threads over on Audiophile Style about it. Some are finding that single computer music servers running the Euphony Stylus OS system sound better. I run Roon as a distributed system, so I need a different computing systems design.
Right now I am feeding my Dutch and Dutch 8c speakers using the Antipodes EX and their P2 digital to digital converter/re-clocker to give me AES out.
I have also used this same design for my Kii Three system and this is the best sound I have gotten from any design I have used.
I am looking forward to see what happens with Roon Ready on the 8c’s.
