Hi I don’t think that this is currently the case. The released version of the Roon server needs to run on hardware that meets certain graphics criteria, even if you decide to run it without a screen and not use it as an end point.
Cheers
Tom
Pity, if it’s just acting as a server why should it demand any gui capability from the host pc?
I believe there will be a headless server release that will not require the graphics capability, but not the current version.
I have given a lot of thought to this. Originally I was thinking of purchasing the Dell Latitude 11 Tablet that has the new remote universal wireless dock which was announced two weeks ago. Also thought about the new i7 NUC. By the way, someone is coming out with 32GB of RAM for this computer; its not been released yet.
However, I have thousands of albums and 8 GB of RAM won’t be enough to display the album covers and I didn’t want to spend any additional money on a new computer right now. So I am going to use my existing computer, a Rain Recording ION DAW that has a Xeon processor and 22 GB of RAM. I understand that a XEON processor is very good for streaming music. I had purchased the additional RAM to use JPlay which never worked too well. The Windows 7 Pro operating system is on a 180 GB SSD.
I have a Dell 2340T touch screen monitor which can be adjusted so that it is almost flush with the table. I have it at an angle. It has an upstream USB port and four USB ports. I now have this on a wooden cocktail table with the keyboard and the mouse. The monitor is connected via HDMI to the ION which is about ten feet in front of it. The computer does make some noise which you can hear when the music is not playing and eventually I may buy a fanless NUC when the Skylake chips are available probably early next year.
I am selling my Synology NAS and HDs and instead purchasing two Seagate 8MB External Hard Drives. I can either run them from the USB port on my router or directly connected to the ION.
I think for those using a remote like an IPAD there may be an issue if you have a large amount of albums which I understand from this forum requires 1GB or 2GB of RAM for each 1,000 albums.
I don’t think that the 2 8MB drives will hold much music! 
How do you know that 8GB of RAM won’t be enough to show the album covers properly? It had been my understanding that 8GB would be plenty.
Unless you have half a million tracks, 8gb will be enough. The amount of ram image textures can consume is also a configurable setting.
Sorry, I saw some posting the other day about that, not sure now who posted it. So 8 GB is fine, that is good to know.
When I started out with computers we had only MBs, not GBs! 
My proposed Roon set-up is as follows.
- Storage: ReadyNAS 6x
holding about 2TB of FLAC / ALAC files - Core / Display - iMac Late 2009
Core 2 Duo
Running OS-X 10.10 16Gb RAM, 128GB (external SSD)
I know this is at the low end of the performance spectrum but a chunk of RAM & fast external SSD (FW800) should help.
This will be connected to my Devialet via USB (Until the Devialet AIR protocol is supported).
Also I don’t intend to control the core from the iMac - it will just act as a glorified cover-art / now-playing display. - Remote - Not sure.
- Was hoping to use the ASUS tablet I have but the Android app won’t install (Intel CPU issues??)
- Some ARM based Nexus tables - but its Google IO on Thursday = new hardware
- ? Surface 3 - because - shiny
- MacBook Air - because - I like Mac.
- iPad Air - because - no iOS App so
- iPhobe 6+ - because - I have one - no iOS App yet so
Why wouldn’t you want to use your ReadyNAS as the core, and everything else as a remote ?
The ReadyNAS isn’t powerful enough to be a Core. I would be happy to run the Core s/w on it if it were possible,
My setup it is , or will be
INTEL Nuc i5 in fanless chassis, 8gb ram, and 64SSD
Synology ds1515 nas
Nuprime DAC-10H
Nuforce ref9 V3SE
Anthony Gallo ref 3.5 speakers
JL E-112 sub
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Looking slick!
I’m running a NUC for my core (also connected to a touch screen). It’s not really up to it. Even with an SSD it’s just not fast enough serving covers and metadata. I have about 5000 albums in the system currently.
I’ll be getting an i7 MacMini in the coming months which I hope will do better.
Curious what type of NUC you are using. My i5 with 16 GB mem and ssd seems fast enough. Granted, I only have 1200 albums.
I noticed 2 comments from @danny on the forum:
- Roon uses mono as an emulator on non-windows platforms -> windows runs faster
- There is room for performance tuning, which might trickle in on one of the upcoming releases
I assume you’ve already ‘tuned’ Roon by setting the memory for fotos\artwork to 512 Mb (the max).
Is there anything else running on the NUC that might impede Roon?
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mine NUC is i5 with 8Gb ram, music is on NAS arround 8000 albums, and Roon works fast.On NUC task manager shows usage only 2Gb of ram, and processor from 10 to 40% max.
Similarly running an i5 Intel NUC with 16GB and a fast SSD. 24,000 albums approx. Roon is fast and album view swipes are excellent. No lag at all. Files reside on a Synology 1813+.
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@Ludwig, which NUC are you running?
The latest generation i5 or i7 NUC with 4GB ram and a good SSD should blow the i7 Mac Mini out of the water for 5k albums.
@Danny, it’s:
Core i5 4250U (1.3GHz, turbo 2.6GHz)
8Gb DDR PC3-12800 memory
Intel SSD 240Gb MSATA 6GB/S, 20NM, MLC
Both direct to my touch screen (over HDMI) and serving across my healthy ethernet/802.11ac network is slower than I am happy with.
I want a high end system but I am not really clear what I should be getting. I’d very much rather not have Windows around the place.
If you don’t want Windows, the answer Mac Mini.
Your NUC should be very fast… in your ‘slower’, are we talking about milliseconds or seconds?