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[blgentry]

As part of my continuing project for a friend who is wanting to do whole house audio, we are considering buying a dedicated PC for MC, running up to about 6 zones of audio.  He doesn't have much interest in video right now, but I have this funny feeling he will end up wanting video too.

I think the Intel NUC is a neat platform since it's small, quiet, and relatively inexpensive.  But I'm having trouble figuring out all the different models.  I'm also unsure how much horsepower this will require.  My gut feeling is that I should advise him to buy an i5 powered NUC with 4 GB of RAM.  Though I think he could probably use an i3 based NUC too as long as he definitely won't do video.

If there are other small form factor PCs that are well regarded I'd be willing to consider those too.

Oh and if there are any good places to buy a NUC that come bundled with Windows 7 (or maybe 8 ), I'm interested in that too.  Otherwise, we'll have to purchase an OEM copy of W7 or W8 somewhere else.   Just trying to get the most value in the purchase.

Any good advice is appreciated.  

Brian.

[DJLegba]

My audio only machine is an i3 NUC with 4GB RAM. It's also running BubbleUPnP so I can stream to Chromecast Audio outside of the main listening room. This is more than enough horsepower for audio. Running Windows 7 headless and it has been glitch-free for more than a year. I love it.

I also have an i3 NUC with 8GB RAM and a better Intel video chip (I forget which one) for DVD/Blu-ray playback in another room. I installed Debian and MC but video playback was terrible, so I switched to Windows 10 with MC as I didn't have a lot of time to spend fiddling with Debian. DVD playback through MC is fine. For Blu-ray I bought PowerDVD 12. I use JRemote to select the movie, and have configured MC to fire up PowerDVD for Blu-ray. PowerDVD won't let me direct audio to my DAC's ASIO driver, but it sends the audio through HDMI to the TV and I send the TV's digital audio to the DAC via TOSLINK, so MC isn't involved there. Still, it all works.

I think an i3 should be good enough. I'm interested in how you propose to set up 6 audio zones. Does your friend have 6 amplifiers, or will some of the zones be things like TV or Chromecast Audio into a set of powered speakers?

[blgentry]

Thanks for the info about your systems.  This is good to know.  What kind of JMark score do those NUCs have?

I'm interested in how you propose to set up 6 audio zones. Does your friend have 6 amplifiers, or will some of the zones be things like TV or Chromecast Audio into a set of powered speakers?

At the moment the plan is:

Use an Asus U7 for multi-zone analog audio out.  Because it has 8 channels, I can build up to 8 mono zones, or 4 stereo zones, or a combination.  I'm planning on probably one stereo zone and perhaps 4 more mono zones.  The stereo zone will have it's own dedicated AVR.

The other general purpose audio zones will all be powered by a 7.1 channel AVR, using it's analog 7.1 channel input.  This will allow me to build 3 zones with 2 speakers each and another zone with one speaker.  (Since the AVR has 7 channels of speaker output.)  I'll just set the AVR's volume to a medium high setting and leave it.  Zone volume will be controlled via JRemote or EOS remote.  I'm hoping this all works as well as it seems like it will. 

Brian.

[BradATIMA]

I use a NUC D54250WYKH with 8GB of RAM and a 240GB SSD. I posted the scores for the Id models in the Id forum as well.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-d54250wykh.html

Here is the JRMark

Running 'Math' benchmark...
    Single-threaded integer math... 5.978 seconds
    Single-threaded floating point math... 3.562 seconds
    Multi-threaded integer math... 3.310 seconds
    Multi-threaded mixed math... 2.147 seconds
Score: 1267

Running 'Image' benchmark...
    Image creation / destruction... 0.614 seconds
    Flood filling... 0.574 seconds
    Direct copying... 0.642 seconds
    Small renders... 1.699 seconds
    Bilinear rendering... 2.120 seconds
    Bicubic rendering... 1.344 seconds
Score: 3146

Running 'Database' benchmark...
    Create database... 0.481 seconds
    Populate database... 2.004 seconds
    Save database... 0.531 seconds
    Reload database... 0.108 seconds
    Search database... 2.692 seconds
    Sort database... 1.374 seconds
    Group database... 0.947 seconds
Score: 2643

JRMark (version 21.0.64): 2352

[DJLegba]

Thanks for the info about your systems.  This is good to know.  What kind of JMark score do those NUCs have?

Not spectacular. The audio only NUC scores 1805 and the HTPC NUC scores 2029. But my DACs do a lot of the work, so I don't need a powerful computer. I wanted the NUCs to be small, quiet, and easy enough on the electricity bill that I could run them 24/7.

[blgentry]

Thanks Brad and DJLegba for the performance data.  Maybe an i3 based NUC is all my buddy needs.  Hmm...

The NUC is still very confusing because it comes in a thousand flavors, but I guess I'll just have to research it.

Brian.