Show us your Raspberry PIs, Intel NUCs and other mini PCs!

[JaccoW]

While some of you are familiar with the Raspberry Pi or its more powerful brother, the Intel NUC, I wonder what people are using in their audio setups.

The last few years a large number of mini PC manufacturers has sprung up using anything from 10W chipsets to firebreathing high-end laptop CPUs and some of those should make for a really nice setup. Either as a media center, retro game emulator or music server.

So let's see them and tell us what you are using them for!

 

[JaccoW]

This of course being motivated by me just ordering a GMKtec NucBox 5 that uses a 10W Intel N5105.

I will be replacing the m.2 42mm SSD with a 1TB model and put all of my music on there together with Home Assistant (for some domotica), probably Roon and run it as a media center in my living room.

Some of the more visible manufacturers are:

• Intel NUC
• Minisforum
• Bee-Link
• MeLe
• BlueJour
• Zotac
• SimplyNuc
• Chuwi
• Asus

I say visible because there are often many, many cheaper no-name options availabe on places like AliExpress that under brands that disappear after a while.

Personally, I plan on getting one of the newer AMD Ryzen models like the Minisforum HX90G that will pop up later this year but those are closer to $1000.

 

[Aldoszx]

One of my Pi4s with custom passive cooling.

 

[simbloke]

I'm using a NUC with a Celeron J4005, cost just £110 a few years ago. I run upmpdcli for music streaming but it also has Kodi for watching recordings.

One of the nice things about it is that there's a built in IR receiver that can power it on.

 

[TheWalkman]

Here’s my PiZero 2W (running Volumio) attached to my Topping D30 driving my Audiphonics S400 Purifi amp. Current speakers are Unifi UF5s.

Absolutely love it!

 

[mrbungle]

Intel NUC 10i3 and two Raspberry Pi4Bs running DietPi. Mostly for Roon, one of the two RPi4s also works as NAS. Happy with it, have it configured to nightly sync my FLAC files to AWS Glacier Deep Archive. Also runs a Time Machine server and Restic backup, the latter also stored encrypted on AWS. All three run 24/7 without any issues.

 

[MCH]

My Raspberry army includes:
A zero 2w running moode with eq connected to a dongle dac for the headphone rig.
A zero 2w running picoreplayer connected with a Loxjie A30 for the terrace rig.
A 4b running LMS with a SSD music library and a USB card to stream the signal from my vinyl rig to the rest of the rigs.
A zero w + allo miniboss waiting to be sold or a new use.
A 4b running camilladsp and squeezelite currently connected to a Motu M4 to my main Amp and two subs. Very soon this rig will be Dirac live capable thanks to a minidsp ddrc24 feeding the pi via usb
All super stable and giving zero issues.
These little things are the definitive toy. And I was super happy with all this until I read @simbloke above telling he can power his NUC (edit: on) with the remote.

 

[Aldoszx]

My smallest streamer is NEO2. I am using it as Roon endpoint with Armbian as OS.

 

[simbloke]

Well I can power it on via the remote ;-)

Quite a few of the Intel NUCs have this and it saves a lot of messing about with external dongles etc.

 

[Berwhale]

I have a fanless Celeron N5105 mini PC running pfSense router software. Details are on this thread along with some other members mini PC setups and recommendations...

New mini PC i can recommend

The model was on my wish list, but I need one with Display Port. How noisy is this one @TheBatsEar?

www.audiosciencereview.com

I'm also considering replacing my main PC (Ryzen 7 1700X, 32GB RAM, GTX 1060 6GB, etc) with one of the BeeLink GTR5 R5900HX boxes...

Beelink AMD Ryzen 9 Mini PC GTR5 5900HX 32G DDR4 500G SSD Only 5 in the EU warehouse！

R5 Main features AMD Ryzen™ 9 5900HX 54W AMD Radeon™ Graphics DDR4 3200MHz Dual channel, Max 64GB M.2 2280 PCle 3.0 Nvme SSD， Max 2TB 2.5 inch SATA HDD Slot (SATA 3.0 6.0Gb/s) Wi-Fi 6E and BT5.2 Support（Update） Support 3 screens 4K60hz, full-featured Type-C Dual 2.5Gbps LAN ports support more...

www.bee-link.net

I don't game anymore, so I don't really need a discrete graphics card or a full size case to put it in. The 5th gen, R9 mobile chip is considerably faster than my 1st gen R7 (which is about 5 years old now)... https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-9-5900X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-1700X/4087vs3915

 

[kchap]

... two Raspberry Pi4Bs running DietPi. Mostly for Roon, one of the two RPi4s also works as NAS. Happy with it, have it configured to nightly sync my FLAC files to AWS Glacier Deep Archive. Also runs a Time Machine server and Restic backup, the latter also stored encrypted on AWS. All three run 24/7 without any issues.

I'm a big fan of the Argon40 case; proper on/off button and they power down correctly when a shutdown command is issues from the GUI. I mainly play with Volumio and MoOde I have tried with PiCorePlayer on the RPIs and LMS as a container on my NAS but I could not get it working correctly. It seems to have buffering issues.

I had 8 6TB disks in a Synology NAS. In the end up bought 2 QNAP 4 bay NAS and put 4 disks in each NAS. Nightly the main NAS backs up data to the other.

 

[Katji]

One of my Pi4s with custom passive cooling.

:-o wow! Well done. ... Nice big copper plate.

 

[Aldoszx]

10x @Katji I have two RPi4s like that.
There are some old computers heat-sinks.

 

[mrbungle]

I had 8 6TB disks in a Synology NAS. In the end up bought 2 QNAP 4 bay NAS and put 4 disks in each NAS. Nightly the main NAS backs up data to the other.

That’s a nice peace of mind setup. QNAP looked pretty awesome. I figured an RPi solution is good enough in my mostly single user and mostly WiFi access case. So I‘d rather spend the money on SSDs and cloud storage. Performance indeed was never an issue so far. It took a bit of fiddling with config files, but there are a lot of great tutorials out there. Deep Glacier is dirt cheap for storage (although they get you with recovery costs if ever needed) and makes it easy to greatly protect your data from malware with 2FA and versioned buckets. I guess that‘s nowadays the most common source of data loss, especially if you use an SSD mirroring RAID setup that essentially eliminates catastrophic loss from hardware failure.

 

[gvh1234]

Some of my Picoreplayers are here

Setup SmartiPi Touch case | piCorePlayer documentation

Plus a dedicated LMS Pi4 server in Argon case

 

[kchap]

That’s a nice peace of mind setup. QNAP looked pretty awesome. I figured an RPi solution is good enough in my mostly single user and mostly WiFi access case. So I‘d rather spend the money on SSDs and cloud storage. Performance indeed was never an issue so far. It took a bit of fiddling with config files, but there are a lot of great tutorials out there. Deep Glacier is dirt cheap for storage (although they get you with recovery costs if ever needed) and makes it easy to greatly protect your data from malware with 2FA and versioned buckets. I guess that‘s nowadays the most common source of data loss, especially if you use an SSD mirroring RAID setup that essentially eliminates catastrophic loss from hardware failure.

I've thought about cloud storage. I've have almost 3TB of flac files and by the time I've finished it could be 4 to 5TB. Given my upload speed is 15 to 20 Mb/s is cloud storage viable?

 

[mrbungle]

I've thought about cloud storage. I've have almost 3TB of flac files and by the time I've finished it could be 4 to 5TB. Given my upload speed is 15 to 20 Mb/s is cloud storage viable?

I use it only as backup for local data loss. Archival storage is much cheaper than instant access (about $1 per TB and month). There are probably ways to make 5TB semi-affordable by using intelligent tiering where rarely accessed files are moved to cheap storage, but not sure. For FLAC, you might as well then just stream from Qobuz or Tidal. (I might have misunderstood, if you asked if initial upload would take too long, 20 Mb/s is fast but would take a while. 5TB is not too bad.)

 

[kchap]

I use it only as backup for local data loss. Archival storage is much cheaper than instant access (about $1 per TB and month). There are probably ways to make 5TB semi-affordable by using intelligent tiering where rarely accessed files are moved to cheap storage, but not sure. For FLAC, you might as well then just stream from Qobuz or Tidal. (I might have misunderstood, if you asked if initial upload would take too long, 20 Mb/s is fast but would take a while. 5TB is not too bad.)

Thanks for the info. I was thinking of archiving. I will do some digging.

 

[somebodyelse]

A couple of fine examples by @Ralph_Cramden and @roog
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-dac-nice-dac-and-vu-meter.29901/post-1051764
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...sette-based-audio-streamer.31537/post-1207610

I gave some details of daphile on a Wyse R90L with internal SSD here - cheap and silent, and looks like every stock R90L pic you'll find. It was the fallback when the perl version on my server OS got ahead of what LMS supported for a while. The Pis live out of sight.

 

[function9]

ASUS Tinkerboard running Volumio connected to Soncoz SGD1. The case was from c4labs with small power button I added.