I have my Roon Core running ROCK on a NUC5i3 with 8MB and a 240GB m.SATA SSD, and have no problems with a library of 78k tracks in 6,000 albums (56% of which are HiRes (24bit PCM or DSD64/DOP64).
I can run mutliple zones and perform DSP on DSD formats.
This is a similar specification for the Nucleus platform, and that is spec’es to up to 10,000 albums (100,000 tracks) and 6 simultaneous zones.
Great info Simon - I know it is always good to have additional capacity, but all to often I see the default advice of “get the latest and greatest 4 core NUC regardless of cost”; it’s nice to see examples like yours for balance. Not least because I’m just about to set up with an NUC7i5, 8GB ram and 120 GB m.SATA drive!
What advantage if any is there in using an i5 instead over an i3 nuc for Rock?
Price - I could get an i5 NUC complete with ram and SDD for less than I could get hold of an equivalent i3 NUC. The i5 processor I’m getting (7300U) also has a higher base frequency and the ability to turbo MUCH higher for the same TDP.
I personally use a nuc 7i7bnh and my library is around 150k tracks. I also use dsd512 upsampling. I do have other core options like an i7700 running windows and sometime run on an iMac or Mbp when traveling so am well familiar with the performance of different platforms.
Rooms capabilities will only improve over coming releases with new features that might demand more than the basic setups will be suited for so I would rather have that head room in my setup.
The i5 is good place start IMHO. I would not consider an i3
That is true, and the only thing that getting an i7 is going to hurt is your bank account, but then the suggested hardware requirements don’t seem to have changed in the past 3 years. Given that the Roon Nucleus has an i3 processor, I also can’t imagine Roon will introduce changes in the software that suddenly inflate the the minimum requirements beyond its capabilities, thus upsetting those that have paid £1500 odd for that bit of hardware.
Brian also suggested earlier in this threat that for a sub 1000 album collection running headless without DSP that a Pentium would provide “few if any observable differences in the overall experience”, so for many people an i7 will just be money down the drain. From my admittedly fresh understanding of Roon, for anyone not upsampling to high rate DSD you are probably better off with a sub i7 processor and putting the money you save towards a new NUC10 in a few years time.
My thoughts exactly. I am still using 4th and 5th gen i3 nucs for general purpose computing so if/when my 7th gen i3 Rock nuc runs out of puff I will just repurpose it and get a new one. Things change so quickly in the hardware world I am happy buying for the moment and if forced to changing down the track. I feel I get better value this way but who really knows?
I’ve been happily running Roon Server on an Asus Windows 10 desktop PC. i5 core with 32Gb of memory.
It works well, but I’ve always wondered if a dedicated server would SOUND better.
Comments?
Maybe!!!
I’m no expert, but I wouldn’t have thought it would make any difference to sound quality; provided it isn’t massively struggling it should still output the correct 1s and 0s. The real difference in sound quality would be turning those into actual noise; I found getting a Chord DAC made a noticeable (all be it small) improvement in sound quality to my untrained ears.
Having run Roon Server on a variety of different computers as Cores, as long as the computer had enough processing power, I did not hear any differences.
Hi folks! I’m new in the Roon universe and I’m a bit worried…Have anybody tried a NUC from Minix, let’s say one with an Intel Pentium N4200 with 8 Gb of RAM? I intend to run only Tidal and about a thousand songs from JRiver MC. Will it do the job?
I have a gaming PC that would crush the NUC but can’t move it close enough to feed the DAC with a 16ft USB cable…
@MuabDib I guess if you have the NUC already try it or look at perhaps something like Ropieee and raspberry pi to connect over ethernet and RAAT see https://www.ropieee.org using you main PC as a core.
also https://codexwilkes.com/downloads/ropieee-guide-for-beginners.pdf
Hi, it’ll run OK but my advice would be to try to avoid using Windows. A ROCK install might work or something from ArchLinux. And an option (noise permitting) is to run Roon on the gaming machine but use an endpoint like a Raspberry Pi as suggested above. Or even the Minix.
Thanks for the advice! I would never have tought of that! It seems pretty strait forward also. But the goal is also to obtain the best results so what do you mean by “noise permitting”? If I run a Cat5 cable from the router to the Pi endpoint and use the USB output to feed my DAC, how noise would be more picked up or generated than by using the computer directly?
I meant audible noise. Is the gaming rig silent or does it have fans?
Ah! yes audible noise. Well the gaming PC will be in a different room so no problem with the noise. It only gets noisy when displaying heavy graphics from demanding games (in fact it’s the GPU that makes noise, the 7 fans in the case don’t make much noise). So just to make sure, I run the Core on the “big rig” that is already connected to the router via Cat5 cable, I then run another Cat5 cable from the router to the Roon endpoint (Raspberri Pi with Ropieee installed) and it’s USB output to the DAC and that’s it? Will I need to configure anything for the endpoint to work in team with the Core?
Basic ropieee setup with Usb ticked in the GUI will suffice. It should just show up in the roon settings / audio under networked zones. The DAC needs to be on for it to show up.
I’d send a pic but I’m in my car 
Personally I would not use the pis usb out its very finnicky and DAC dependant. Some will play upto 384/24 with no issues others not so lucky. I could not get higher thanI96/24 without clicks. Also the new 3b+ is awful over usb worse than the older models. The issue with the pi is the Ethernet shares the same bus as the usb. The 3b+ added a gige port and it causes no end of issues, especially with Ropieee.
Thanks for your time and answers. I’ll look into this!