I’ve bought exactly the same NUC, placed the m2 data drive from my old NUC and everything runs as a charm with no problems what so ever.
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That’s fantastic. Thanks for chiming in!
Hi Jan, how is your perception of the usage of the fan end fan noice level compared to your old NUC?
- and what NUC version did you have roon installed on before?
BR
Hi,
My “old” NUC was a NUC7i3BNH with 8gb memory and 120 Gb WD m2 sata drive. 49000 tracks on a external 4Tb USB HDD directly connected to my NUC.
My DAC is a Devialet D400. The first thing the Devialet does is processing files to 32/384 WAV. Because of this I don’t use DSP etc. at the ROCK side. Resource usage of my NUC stays very low this way, accordingly temperatures stay low and the fan doesn’t get involved.
Involvement of a fan and accompanying noise is very much a result of your individual set-up, in mine it’s not an issue.
Next to all this above the NUC resides in a cupboard making fan noise even harder to hear.
Conclusion from me should be “no comment”
Thank you for sharing. I’m currently running with a 4 years old NUC D54250WYK based on an i5 CPU.
It have been running with JRiver and Kodi (XBMC) just as long, but getting to know Roon recently made me consider buying a NUC8i7BEH and installing ROCK on it.
I’d really like to see a proper Roon supported NUC8 model or similar new hardware listed soon. I’m a lifetime subscriber and I’m very happy with Roon progress and really love the product. I’m ready to devote a proper core to it. I just used a spare computer initially to test and although it’s i5 8GB running on Win10, it lags and seems slow intermittently. But I really can’t buy a new ‘old’ NUC7 in Jan 2019. Hope some updated guidelines for hardware will surface soon. I want to setup my new core as an appliance and trust it will be supported well by Roon for some time.
Yes, NUC8 official support would be nice. However, NUC7i7DNHE has a TDP of only 15W, lower than 28W TDP of NUC8i7BEH, for those who care about fanless or LPS.
But you can! And like @wklie i agree, the series 8 NUCs may be too power consuming for an appliance. And Roon will not cease to support 7-series NUCs for ROCK anytime soon. Hell, i am running a 6-series i5 along with a 7i3 and they both are excellent appliances, running very cool, stable, quiet, and bloody fast as ROCK servers.
(Actually the NUC7i3 is the quickest of its feet of all of my Roon cores, must be down to its slightly higher clock freq. and no speed stepping and still a low, nice 15W TDP)
My lib is about 120K tracks locally and about 4-500 albums from Todal and Qobuz. No issues upsampling to DsD128 if i feel like it.
Bench testing showed some/all of the 28 W TDP NUC8 units to consume less power than the 15 W TDP NUC7 units. Any NUC8 power/thermal profile concerns seem overblown. Also, that DNHE model is/was not part of the regular consumer NUC lineup.
Basically, I do not get all of the hand wringing over NUC8 support. Plenty of ROCK users have been running NUC8 units for several months now.
AJ
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Hi, can you explain a bit more?
These figures are highly theoretical and likely a NUC8 will be as quiet and cool as a NUC7 in a low processing situation. But occasionally they will max out. Based of the power consumption of my i7-8700 Hexacore in normal circumstances which is vanishingly low…
Some real world figures can be seen (and added) here!
Do a simple search query. It is a commercial/enterprise model.
The NUC7 and NUC8 consumer units all are BxH or BxK.
AJ
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I searched “NUC8i7BEH power consumption benchmark”, the first link is:
The highest consumption we can record is 78 W from the small (~12.3 x 4.5 x 3.0 cm) 90 W AC adapter when running both Prime95 and FurMark simultaneously. Because of throttling, however, the system is unable to maintain a consumption of 78 W and it eventually stabilizes at just under 50 W …
FWIW (and slightly off-topic) I’ve been running a NUC8i7BEH with Windows 10 and RoonServer installed. I wanted to be able to occasionally do something else with the machine…
BIOS settings were tweaked to lower/eliminate fan noise. I can’t hear a thing from the unit now while RoonServer plays to five or six zones with MQA unfolding or high-bitrate playback. It has never been more stable, even compared with ROCK on the now returned NUC7iBNH. Stress tests show the system only going up to around 68°C under heavy, persistent load, e.g. eGPU gaming 
. I’m more than happy.
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No, that is not how to measure power consumption in an always on “appliance.” That presents an unrepresentative sample. Try this instead:
NUC7i5BNK:
Windows 10, idle on desktop 13.6 W
NUC7i7BNH:
Windows 10, idle on desktop 13.7 W
NUC8i3BEH:
Windows 10, idle on desktop 4.3 W
NUC8i5BEH:
Windows 10, idle on desktop 5.6 W
AJ
Thanks for everyone’s input. In my case I have Roon Core in another room with a bunch of noisy servers so noise isn’t an issue. Lower power use is always nice but I really want snappy performance as a top priority. I’m most familiar with Windows (servers and workstation) so support and patching is not a real chore for me. That said, if I can turn this into something I don’t have to think about or check on, all the better. My existing i5 8GB RAM, 250 GB SSD running latest patch set of Win10 Pro hesitates now and then. I threw the Roon Core on this old workstation just to test and now I can’t live without Roon. There maybe something wrong with my old workstation and now that I’m committed to Roon I’d like to find the ideal host environment. I’d like to make the right choice today to have it run for several years with minimal intervention. I like the idea of NUC standard hardware, just a little leary of buying NUC 7 when NUC 8 is out. Although, I can see the valid points made above about NUC 7. Since NUC 8 looks a little problematic from @saschamt experience, I might have to wait for now. I’ll also scour the site for any references to Hyper-V VM installations, that would be a reference hardware environment that would be easy for me to implement. It’s too bad a Roon Core/ROCK couldn’t be hosted by Hyper-V (or other VM host), a packaged Roon Core/ROCK VM would be great. Thanks again for the thoughtful comments and suggestions. If anyone has suggestions for ideal current, supported, host environments for Roon Core or ROCK, let me know. I don’t think these make any difference but use several types of endpoints: Windows and Mac PCs, Bryston, BluOS and remotes on iPAD, Windows Tablet, Android phones.
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FWIW, lots of people seem to be running ROCK on NUC8s now (see various threads here). However, if you really want NUC8 hardware and for some reason ROCK doesn’t work, you can always install the OS yourself and then install Roon Core on top of it. That way you are in full control of the OS and can deal with any missing drivers/etc on the NUC8 hardware yourself. You can still run Windows if you prefer (and the devs have said that Windows is preferred for people with very large libraries, as the Windows .Net libraries are better optimized than the libraries available for Mono). Personally, I prefer Linux and run my Roon Core on a CentOS 7 system.
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Hey Chris. I think you’ll be fine with a NUC8, too. Lots of people are running them like @cwichura said and my issue seemed to be an isolated quirk. Performance-wise the NUC8i7BEH handles everything I throw at it like a champ.
No. I disagree. I believe in worst case scenario for engineering / component decisions. Seeing a NUC7i7BNH only uses 13.7W on idle, then buying a 36W LPS for it is going to result in a waste of money and waste of time tracking down mysterious faults.
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