I have a 5 year old NUC8i3BEH ROCK that I built. It works ok, but would love to get a speed increase. Library is about 66k songs. I am a Mac household and wonder if I could get a performance increase with an M1 or better Mac mini with 16gb ram.
Any input? And, if I were to do this, can anyone point me to a “how to” like I’m 6 years old? 
Thanks !!
I seem to remember the NUC8 being a good fast device for Roon
I have a NUC10i5 and compared it with a 16GB M1 Mac Mini and a 32GB Xeon based Trashcan Mac Pro (10 years old) and because of the extra cores the Nuc came out on top as searching was faster and generally felt a little faster opening album’s etc but it was very close between the M1 and NUC.
Now a M2 Pro Mac Mini or an M4 pro model would probably be an improvement, but they are expensive when you addi extras. I got the top of the range M4 pro well North of £2k when I priced it up. Now if I was going to get a Titan, then heck yes I would spec up that Mac Mini to the hilt
Speed? My 2018 Roon dedicated Mac Mini’s search function is instantaneous.
It’s library dependent and when I was searching across My 95k library, Qobuz and Tidal for The The (bugs in Roon) and other searches. It was using 8 cores across the NUC, 6 cores on the Mac Mini M1 (only 4 performance cores) and all 6 cores on the Trashcan. The fact that the NUC had 8 meant that is was consistently about 20% faster in this real world test than the Mac Mini and the trashcan was the slowest. That suggests that the pure performance of the M1 performance processor is quite a bit higher, but
The M1 Mac Mini is a great machine and it is streaming HQPlayer to play music as I type this. It just wasn’t faster for what I wanted.
Base m4 has basically the same single core performance as the m4 pro. And that’s what’s important for roon. If you are not going crazy by streaming multichannel DSD to multiple endpoints at the same time while indexing a massive library the Base M4 should be perfectly fine for most people
At least it has been a amazing roon machine for me. (But so was my M1 before the M4 , but the 16gb ram keep everything snappy and responsive)
I have multiple Macs in the house, and love the Mx based Minis and think that they are great devices.
They are just not always faster and as someone who is sad enough to have 6 computers in the house I carried out the testing for myself. If I was not using the M1 for HQPlayer it is possible that I would have kept Roon on it for longer than the 6 weeks I did. I would also really like to get an M4 Pro, but I have problems justifying it.
I also happen to like the NUC running DietPi as well and I have no more preference for one platform over another so I am happy to go with what works the best for me.
Faster hardware may yield a small incremental improvement, but the performance bottleneck is in the Roon software itself. There have been many reports (some which I’ve experienced myself) of high CPU and memory usage, memory leaks, stuttering and lagginess in the UI, etc. Fixing these issues may involve software architectural changes and would be long term projects for Roon, but it is where meaningful performance improvements could be achieved.