So in my stupid move of the month I purchased a Farad Super 3 to power my NUC. As it turns out I did not pay enough attention that the i7 I use needs too much power. It shut down a few times in the 5 days I had it on. I have moved the Farad to the P10 off the UPS (I use the UPS for the NUC and NAS) to see if the steady voltage (which I thought a UPS would deliver too) and it stayed up 1 night. That does not mean its solved.
Farad says if I turn off Hyperthreading that will help fix, plus make it sound better. I do not believe in the 2nd part of that statement but if the first is correct I can stay with it. Having a real hard time finding a 6A LPS with 19V. A few Chinese ones. The Farad 10 is way too much for my pocket to handle.
I think I can return the Super 3 if I have to, but wondering if others have done this.
I have a Nucleus with an i7 but given it runs Roon’s version of Linux, I cannot access processor features. However, I never noticed a degradation in audio quality when applying processor intensive DSP settings. What really made a difference is using an independent SSD NAS vs. internal NUC music storage because the latter shares the internal power capacitors with the motherboard and processor.
How are you using the NUC? Do you stream via USB, Roon Rock music server? I use the latter and use a switching supply and clean up signal before entering my streamer. If you are streaming via USB from the NUC you can do the same with a device that buffers and reclocks the usb and if needed converts to I2s. Even with a LPS the NUC is noisy.
Not a big fan of direct from china, but late last night I did grab this for just over $200. If I had seen that Stack one first I may have spent the extra for the better build quality. Not sure how much “better” it would be, I think this one gets me 90% way there, but I would rather support them than China. I was way to focused on 6A as the nuc cheapo supply saids 19v 6.2a … If I saw this was made for Nucleus, I would have jumped on it. See how this thing goes. But I am going to return the Farad. It just keeps shutting down. I am sure that is not good for my Core.
I have professionally done performance profiling with HT On/Of on Intel CPUs and can say that if you are not running at over 65% utilization for long periods of time, then it’s a non-factor. If all your NUC is doing is running RoonServer, then this should never be a problem. My I5 averages less than 10% CPU utilization when running a Roon stream.
The factors here is amps needed. 3 is not enough when it kicks in apparently for i7. It has shut down on me every day. So I have decided to send it back. Not going to play around with settings and risk damage if it goes over 3A.
I don’t doubt that 3A would not be enough if all the cores are lit up since the TDP of a 3.5MHz i7 is 28W. My point was that a Roonserver process should not stress to that level and that there are likely other processes or hardware bringing up the current level and this HT On/Off would not have an impact. If you are concerned about sound quality, then profiling what else is running is a worthwhile exercise.