Within my short space of time with (tinkering), I’ve finally ended up like others with an Intel Nuc…
I’ve been shopping around for a NUC8i5 for the last month and managed to snag a couple at descent prices. Picked up a 16GB/500GB NUC8i5BEH for £180, and picked up another (8GB/256GB) NUC8i5BEK for £160, both in mint condition. I thought about adding a Akasa case for £99 for a fanless setup, which I may do down the road. Then it’s only cost me £270 for the whole setup. (Only running ROCK)
The other is going to be used to access my home network with Tailscale, I might even Hacktintosh it.
Originally started out with a Optiplex 7100, i7, then a Optiplex 3050 i5. However… SWMBO wanted me to declutter the space as I have my Synology units too. So, the NUC was the most obvious choice.
A few days now Intel NUC12 i3 (NUC12WSHI3), 16G*2 - 32GB RAM, 1TB NVME M.2 (500G wasn’t available at the next shop), 4TB SSD.
The fan is so quiet, that I can’t hear the fan 1 meter away. HDMI does not function.
Qobuz
I have 2 TB of music in flac which I have to migrate now to Roon Rock …
Edit: Different Music to 6 endpoints - no problem. Five parallel different DSD256 streams to 5 endpoints - no problem. The processing speed for DSD256 downsampling goes down to 8,9*.
I have just changed from a QNAP NAS to an Intel NUC 11TNH i5 with 16GB memory, Samsung 970 evo plus for the database and Samsung 870 QVO 4TB internal SSD for storage. I cannot be happier. Performance is amazing and everything is rock solid. Pun intended
4-8gb should be good enough for almost everyone. a few of you might need 16gb.
Not at all on ROCK. Not even a little bit. More RAM will just go unused. If ROCK runs out of RAM, Roon will crash. If you are not crashing, no need to add RAM.
Performance wins? No.
Stability wins? Only if you are running out of RAM. With 8GB on ROCK, that’s probably around 300k tracks, or maybe even more.
Thanks @danny, very clear. More RAM = more scale for (much) larger library.
Towards performance tuning, might an M.2 replacement be worth the investment?
As RAM is out, would this be best remaining upgrade option besides replacing the NUC?
Mine was good in its time but is now a 5-year vintage
I’m probably an outlier here, but I have a NUC11PAHi5 that is running FreeBSD. Since Roon doesn’t support FreeBSD (sad-panda.gif) I have a bhyve (FreeBSD’s built-in hypervisor, pronounced “beehive”) VM running Debian 10 for Roon. I’ve assigned it 2 CPUs, and initially allocated 16GB of RAM (the NUC has 64GB physical). Over time I’ve continued to cut down the RAM, and it’s been happily running with only 2GB allocated for a long time now.
I suppose my point is that if you’re getting a NUC for Roon, you might want to consider not dedicating the NUC to Roon unless you have a truly massive library and/or many users hitting the Core all at once.
I understand there are reasons behind the server requirements, but in my experience Roon Core isn’t has heavy an application as it seems.
Purchased the Intel NUC10i7FNH. It came with 32GB ram, 1TB M.2 & 1TB SATA SSD, all for a bargain price of £260.
Swapped out the 128GB M.2 from the NUC8i5, into the NUC10i7. Edited the BIOS, and I was back up and running ROON in about 20 mins.
As I kept the Legacy boot, I didn’t have to reinstall. And, as I keep music on an external drive, it was just a matter of plugging it in. ROON rescanned the files.
I’ll be turning the NUC8 into a headless subnet router to access my network while away.
Finally upgraded from Core running on a Dell Micro Inspiron to ROCK running on Intel NUC. So I would have to wonder in a week if I should have bought faster or bigger, I went all out.
NUC: NUC12WSHI7
Memory: 64 GB
NVME: Samsung 970 EVO 500 Gig
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB
I use DSP extensively, but I know the memory and NVMe are overkill, but with the current low cost of memory, I thought why not, This setup should last me 5-7 years, or more.
NUC 10 Performance NUC10i5FNHN for me. 16Gb ram, Samsung SSD (250 Gb for system, 1Tb for library). Probably overkill for my uses, but better to have too much than find out it’s too little later. Runs 24/7 and has been fine. Located in another room from the listening area next to the modem and router so fan noise is not a problem. Didn’t motivate myself enough to run Ethernet from upstairs to downstairs so it’s connected to the iFi Stream over WiFi. So far, everything works.
