Roon Core: Windows 10 Pro 64 bit, Latest roon core build i7 6700k 32Gb RAM M.2 SSD
1Gb ethernet (wired)
Roon Endpoint: Windows 10 Pro Intel i3 NUC 8Gb RAM ASIO driver USB to T+A DAC8 DSD
I currently have all of my music (FLAC - mix of low and hi res) on Dropbox located on the M.2. drive on Roon Core. I’m trying to configure maximum offload on my 6700k CPU to create the maximum possible chance for DSD512 upsampling stability. At the moment the core is running around 1.8x in Roon. This is just about OK until the Windows box running Core wants to do something else (like syncing Dropbox).
Does anyone think that moving Dropbox to a remote machine / NAS / 3.1 USB SSD etc will have any positive bearing on CPU load on Core - or am I just going to find that I need to upgrade my Core machine or return to DSD256 upsampling?
I haven’t tried this recently but I think you can create a network share on the machine hosting Dropbox files and then connect to that share via other machines. Many NAS appliances seem to have Dropbox integrations too…
If you offload the Dropbox tasks to the NAS it may help, but something even easier to try would be to enable Parallelize Sigma-Delata Modulator in the DSP’s Sample Rate Conversion settings. This option would use multiple CPU cores for the upsampling and may help with your intended usage.
Thanks @noris. I’d already set this option. 1.8x with DSP seems to be the best I can achieve with my 6700K… I may look at HQ Player again but it seems quite expensive and an additional layer of cost.
No, Dropbox is not a CPU intensive application. It’s I/O, and then even that is limited primarily by your Internet bandwidth likely being far slower than any native LAN speeds.
Mac: Dropbox sync on Mac uses a lot of CPU according to Activity Monitor. I’m not an expert on this but % CPU column showed well over 140% (so 1.4 cores if I understand this correctly). I have an i7 mid-2014 2.8Ghz MBP with 16Gb ram.
Windows: my 6700k Windows 10 machine running Core showed CPU in the range 1-3% in Task Manager with Dropbox sync (so not significant) but towards the end of the sync suddenly shot up to 21% for around 15 seconds.
Test: I’m using Smart Sync on Dropbox and my checks above were done by making files online only and then changing the Smart Sync setting to local for a 1Gb DSD512 track.
I/O is clearly relevant but CPU load also seems to be a factor based (solely) on my tests above…
This does not seem to be a sustained CPU usage here, but I would try to close Dropbox Sync and see if that allows you to play DSD512 properly.
If you are still having issues with Dropbox sync closed, you will have an an idea how much the sync is impacting the playback and can then take another look at the hardware in use.