Except for the enabling of the cool fan and S3 power management, the BIOS is at default. These are the headroom numbers that I got right out of the box, albeit with greater CPU temperatures.
In comparison, I never got more than about 3x with my now-six-months-old desktop Dell XPS 8930 with current generation i7 and 16gb RAM.
I have almost 140k files, many of which are hi-res and I have DSP on full time. That could have something to do with this, maybe?
No, not really. Library size will affect search and other database intense activities, but simply playing a local file while upsampling will not, i’m pretty convinced.
You can have a look av various performance figures for a multitude of machines and OS’s of you look at the Performance Matrix Google Spreadsheet i reference in the first post of the link. It shows speeds for upsampling local redbook files to 24/192 and DSD128.
Unless there’s a specific reason not to, I am going to restore the “Cool” setting for the fan and the S3 power management, so that I can throttle back to 99% to avoid heat issues. (FWIW, the CPU temps haven’t gone over 41c yet, despite about ten minutes of play.)
Here’s to the desktop system, which doesn’t go through a switch like the main system does. The signal path is “poor.”
So many people have asked for this, so why don’t you just give us that feature so people can just have peace of mind that their NUC or Nucleus won’t catch on fire or is not burning from the inside. I do not understand how this information being available would go against the goals of ROCK and have been curious about this for a while. I am not trying to start an argument or bashing Roon or anyone in any way and would very much appreciate a quick explanation. Thanks
This is really strange? You might just have a bad RAM stick or something?
(Btw, the NUC’s take advantage of dual channel memory, so you will gain some performance by going 2x4Gb or 2x8Gb rather than one bigger stick.)
Anyway, your second screenshot is while upsampling a lossy file (mp3), thats why the signal path is “less than optimal”.
Something is not correct, thats for sure.
Still, hope you get this sorted quickly, we surely benefit from some good music in these strange times!
The low quality in the Signal Path is due to the use of MP3 as the source. Roon will indicate the quality of each step, in this case notice the yellow dot by the MP3 source line.
I think Danny has just told you - it’s not in alignment with the goals of ROCK. The Nucleus (and a NUC running Roon OS) is an appliance; not a general purpose computer.
My TV is also an appliance - it may be a smart TV, but I’m not bothered that it doesn’t tell me the CPU temperature.
@Geoff_Coupe nailed it… putting in that feature is counter to the “appliance” nature of the device. You shouldn’t be checking the temperature. It should be good and never go bad. This is our opinion on what we think ROCK should be. We aren’t right, nor are we wrong. It’s just our opinion of how things should work.
Also note, this is not true of all installs. Many installs may require temperature monitoring. For those installs, you can use RoonServer with any other Linux distribution which are far more flexible and far less opinionated.
One could say the same about displaying the available storage space, or uptime. A hidden “stats for geeks” button would be nice, and not counter the “appliance” nature of the device.
You could, but I wouldn’t. Uptime / serial is there for support to see in screenshots people provide. It’s a small trick used to reduce support burden.
Storage space is required since it’s a resource that eventually gets used up.k
if it was something we wanted to spend time on, that’d be a good way to do it.
I am happy for you then. But for the many other people using your same TV and do want to see the CPU temperature, would it ruin your experience if I could press a button on my remote control which showed the temperature?
I have figured out my poor signal path issue, after doing a clean reinstall of Windows and adding nothing to my drive other than my browser and Samsung Magician.
When I run Roon without CPU throttling, I get 3.3-3.5x processing speed, but temps are back in the 70c+ range. (High 80’s as I edit this post now.)
When I run Roon with 99% max CPU in the advanced power management options, I get 1.3-1.4x processing speed, but temps are in the low 40c’s.
I am on the horns of a dilemma here.
Since I am able to play from Roon without significant issues even with the CPU throttled, I am inclined to go with lower temps. However, I haven’t finished re-installing the database and I fear that, with the CPU throttled, it’s going to take another minute-forty-five to load Roon.
There are some settings in the BIOS that limit CPU power that I haven’t tried out yet, but I don’t know why throttling there would lead to a different result than throttling through advanced power management.
I knew about the performance hit with one stick rather than two, but, after reading a bit, decided to go with one stick in case it turned out that I needed 32gb at some point. If I only run music, I probably don’t, but I wasn’t sure how that was going to work out when I was ordering parts…
Are you going to upsample every song you play in Roon to DSD256? Really, is that necessary?
If this is something you are doing occasionally, let the CPU do it’s thing. It’s not going to incinerate.
If you feel you need to do that for everything you play, you may get a slightly shorter CPU lifetime. Maybe.
I’d be okay leaving it that way (unthrottled). When I push Plex hard the CPU gets up there, but its only for relatively short periods of time.
Yeah, I just set and forget, usually. My Topping D90 really shines with DSD256 because its chip bypasses some internal processes when at DSD256 and my Wyred4Sound sounds slightly better with it.
I can roll the dice. I also will look into the cooling properties of the Turing FX case, as that might be another solution.
This is not bad… 80C is a fine temp for that CPU to run at. You’ll get many years of life if it hits 80C when doing playback. Far longer than the life of that machine’s usefulness.
Tonight, all but one core ran between 94c and 97c while I played music, at least momentarily. That can’t be good.
So, back to the original question: assuming that I can get ROCK installed by changing the BIOS to legacy boot and that my USB-to-ethernet adaptor is up to the task of connecting to my network, would ROCK run any cooler due to lesser overhead?
I also will look into the cooling properties of the Turing FX case, as that might be another solution.