The right Intel NUC for Rock

[Norratz (Gront Vorg)]

Hey Hi
I’m currently running Roon on my PC and want to change over to more energy efficient NUC so I can leave it on when I’m away form home, accessing it via ARC. Supported models listed on the Roon website has NUC11TNHi5, NUC10i5FNx. Am I right to assume that NUC11TNKi5 or NUC10FNH would also be supported? - The only difference being it does/doesn’t have a 2.5 drive bay.

Also, if anyone has experience with these 2 models (or similar), 16gb RAM, and a relatively large music collection of around 7k albums, lossless - Would love to hear from you.
Thanks!

[mjw]

The TNK variant is a slim case, i.e., no internal drive bay, but otherwise, I believe it is the same.

NUC11TN_TechProdSpec.pdf

https://www.asus.com/global/support/faq/1052685/

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/intel-nuc/NUC11TNK_L6_UserGuide.pdf

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

And the x in NUC10i5FNx means “any letter”, so FNH is included.

[Norratz (Gront Vorg)]

Great, thought so. Thanks for the responses!

[David_Snyder]

If you don’t need to apply volume leveling and other DSP to DSD files, this is a pretty good (unsupported) solution:

MOCK Success Report - GMKtec Mini PC N97

I can confirm that the GMKtec Mini PC N97 appears to work fine with the latest (as of this writing) Roon ROCK factory reset image. I almost always stick to officially supported NUC part numbers when installing Roon OS. I picked up the GMKtec during the Prime Day sale and figured why not give my a try? There was no need to change any BIOS settings. Just flash the image to a thumb drive, insert it, boot the image by pressing F7 within 3 seconds of power-on, and follow the prompts. YMMV, but t…

I’ve built three of these for friends and family. Everyone is quite happy so far, and the time/cost/effort are all tiny compared to doing an officially supported ROCK build.

[Vitor_Goncalves (Vitor)]

In 2022 I decided to move to a NUC because I didn’t want to rely on my notebook being switched on all the time. I bought : (1) NUC10i5FNHN Barebone; (2) Kingston A400 SSD M.2 2280 SATA Rev 3.0, 240GB; (3) Crucial RAM CT16G4SFRA266 16GB DDR4 2666MHz CL19.

I couldn’t be happier. It just works. Trouble free. Never had any problem with it, upgrades are a breeze, it’s really silent. I have about 3000 albums in my Tidal, Quobuz and local stored music (external attached drive via USB) and don’t use heavy DSP. I have two roon ready streamers. The NUC can also be connected directly to a USB DAC, which turns it into another endpoint (although this is not Roon Labs recommendation). Later on, I doubled down the RAM (it was on sale) but couldn’t see any difference. I believe my NUC wouldn’t need a 240gb SSD (only 2% is being used) and there’s more RAM than necessary. Overall, I guess I’ve spent about 600 Euros at the time.

Hope this helps.

[Norratz (Gront Vorg)]

Hi David. I do apply volume leveling as I mostly listen to playlist, but rarely if ever have more then one zone active at a time. Thanks for the tip tho.

[David_Snyder]

This mini PC handles volume leveling for PCM files and streams perfectly fine. I should verify, but it can probably keep up with volume leveling after converting DSD to PCM.

However, when Roon applies DSP to native DSD streams, it upsamples them from 1-bit to 64-bits. That’s a massive increase in data processing. Too much for the little Intel N97 processor.

TL;DR - if you don’t have any SACD rips or DSD downloads in your library, you’re good.

[RickInHouston]

@Norratz

NUC11TNHi5

This thread has me thinking…

My Ifi Go Pods sometime fail me. Could it be volume leveling? I’m going to have to give this a try!

Cheers.

[Mark_Boulter]

I’m in the process of deciding on a replacement for the aging Lenovo Yoga i7 based laptop I currently use as a Roon Server (I can’t upgrade it to W11). This thread and the referenced one was super useful - thank you.