I can play 5.6 DSD on a Netbook with an atom processor without any stuttering. The files are on a usb connected drive, not a NAS. As a test, I would suggest you try putting some of the files on the internal drive and see how that works. If that works, try a usb drive if possible. My guess is that the problem may be the NAS connection rather than the CPU itself. I tried a NAS setup with my Netbook and never could get consistent playback of high rez files. I have pre-buffering set at 2 seconds. You might try that. For high rez, I also put 3 seconds of silence at the end of each track and 2 seconds of silence at the beginning of each track to help with pre-loading. The system is bitstreaming to a usb DSD capable DAC. JMark - Math 278, Image 465, Database 687, Overall 477. Now that is one slow machine. It is running Windows 7 Starter with no anti-virus and no network activity when playing music, except a JRiver client used as a remote control. The testing I suggest may give more information about what is causing the problem.