Fanless Skull Canyon NUC for HQPlayer

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I have just completed installing an Intel Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK motherboard into an Akasa Galactico fanless chassis:

 

NUC6i7KYK

8GB DDR4 SODIMM

Samsung 850 EVO 1TB M.2-2280 SATA SSD

Akasa Galactico case

Windows Server 2016 OS

HQPlayer 3.16.4

 

This NUC can deliver stutter-free playback of 24/192K or 24/352.8K (DXD) PCM upsampled to DSD512 going out USB with the following settings:

 

Poly-sinc-xtr-mp-2s

AMSDM7 512+fs

 

CPU utilization is about 52% when upsampling 24/192K to DSD512.  A thank-you to @tboooe for providing these settings.

 

I did have to set Windows power plan to "High performance" and enable "Multicore DSP" in HQPlayer for the DSD512 output to be stutter and crackle free.

 

By itself, the Skull Canyon NUC has by far the noisiest cooling fan among all the NUCs, and that fan doesn't stop even when the unit idles in Windows, so the stock NUC really has no place in the listening room.  This is where the Akasa fanless chassis comes in.  From what I can tell, the passive thermal solution works very well to cool the 45W Core i7-6770HQ CPU, using four heat pipes and large cooling fins.

 

I suspect this NUC6i7KYK is possibly the only Intel NUC model that's up to the job of up-sampling PCM to DSD512.  It takes a 4-core/8-thread recent generation CPU with a high turbo frequency, since there is no NVIDIA CUDA offload option.  The Core i7-6770HQ mobile Skylake CPU makes the NUC6i7KYK the highest performing NUC in retail today.  Even the Core i7-7567U Kaby Lake CPU in the latest NUC7i7BNH Kaby Lake NUC is only dual-core/4-thread with a smaller cache.

 

There are of course many other ways to build a PC for running HQPlayer, but this NUC6i7KYK just meets the "up-sample-to-DSD512" mark.  It may not be the most energy-efficient either, as another fanless PC I built with Core i7-6700T (35W Skylake desktop) CPU is ironically less power hungry with the same workload.  The lower NUCs are easily made into NAA boxes, but it takes the NUC6i7KYK for HQPlayer to pull off up-sampling to DSD512.

 

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On 7/20/2017 at 6:12 PM, slingshot said:

Hi, I have been looking into this combination also but to run Roon Remote on it not Roon Core as I didn't think it was powerful enough to run HQ Player.  Nice to know you have not have trouble with it; it would streamline my system.  I would just connect external hard drives to it rather than using hard drives on my main computer. There have been some complaints about it freezing it up on the Intel forums. 

 

When you say motherboard do you mean the  Barebones PC Kit? 

 

Was it difficult to install?I looked at the manual and there are 18 steps. I have a friend who is an IT hardware guy and I will probably have him install it for me. 

 

 I plan on purchasing a T & A Dac 8 or their more expensive DAC and using HQ Player to upsample to 512. 

 

 

 

By motherboard I mean the circuit board (PCB assembly) inside the NUC chassis.

 

The installation instructions for the Akasa Galactico case don't cover the removal of the PCB assembly & CPU thermal solution from the Intel case.  I discovered I had to remove just about every screw visible before the PCB assembly could be freed.

 

The installation procedure is quite straightforward, though a bit time consuming.  I also realized once the assembly is completed, the DDR4 SODIMM memory module and M.2 SSD module(s) will be completely inaccessible and not even visible, since they sit face down against the bottom of the chassis, so I had to make decisions on how much memory and SSD to install onto the PCB up front.  The NUC6i7KYK barebones PC kit does not come with any memory or M.2 SSD pre-installed, so you get to decide on these.

 

I used Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound instead of the supplied white-colored thermal compound for the heat pipes.  The steps in the guide need to be strictly followed, especially when tightening the various screws towards the end.