Help a fellow on a system upgrade

Dear fellow Volumionauts,

I’ve been using my current setup for quite a while and was very happy with it. I now feel though that with growing functionalities of Volumio and also a growing library that the performance of my setup has decreased over time and is no longer sufficient. Especially when browsing or searching the library I notice lags and delays which became a bit tedious. So I’m currently considering an upgrade of my setup but feel a bit lost on what particular components to choose without redesigning the entire system. Thererfore I’d like to ask for your advice.

My current setup:

You can find my setup here:
Volumio + 2.42" OLED + PSU in one aluminium case - Diy and Tweaks / Diy Volumio Projects - Volumio Community

I try to make it an cost effective upgrade. As you can see my setup is built in a quite compact case with a custom front panel which fits perfectly into my sideboard. If possible I’d like to keep that housing and just replace some parts of what’s inside. I’d also like to keep the DAC and reclocker as well as the display since I’m very happy with those.

What’s certainly to discuss are the Raspberry Pi and thus most probably the PSU as well.

What would you recommend for an upgrade?

I’ve seen many projects now done with RPi 5 which brings lots of performance onto the table which would be interesting for the library I have. I noticed though that cooling might be challenging especially under a hat?

I guess for any kind of upgrade my power supply is to weak. E. g. for an RPi 5 it seems like 5A are a minimum and a PSU delivering this while also powering the DAC and being small enough to fit into the housing seems to be a hard find.

Any ideas on those? I just try to figure out if my idea of a plan is possible or if have to plan for a whole new setup after all.

Thanks in advance for your brains!

Kevin

Pricewise you can opt for a rPi4 4 or 8GB. Which most likely can be powered with the current PSU.
If you go for a rPi5, you can take the default cooling fan, add a GPIO extender (be aware of all the fakes on amazon, these fakes have to thin pins, which will cause all kind of errors. These have the correct thickness), but then you also need a new PSU.

To improve performance on the rPi3, reduce your album covers < 800kB. A big library should not have that much impact on performance.

Hi Wheaten,

Thanks for your wisdom!
I guess the RPi 4 would be a cheap alternative then. I suspect the ram upgrade would have the most noticeable impact compared to the RPi3?
In regards of RPi 5 I unfortunately cannot use a GPIO extender as the entire setup gets to high for the housing then. I already had to make some custom rightangled connectors for the OLED connection on top of the Piano because of this. I suspect going with a Pi 5 would mean an entire new setup then.

My library actually only has embedded album covers within the FLAC files. Most of them are rather small though like 500x500px.
Playback of 24 bit FLAC is fine. I however notice some hickups when playing DSD files.

Thanks!

yeah DSD can eat some resources :slight_smile:

But for the rPi5, looking at the picture there is indeed not much space left

I now ordered a Pi 4 with 4GB RAM and will give that a try. That should do it hopefully through the next few years and then I might be looking into a complete new setup with colored display and all the other fancy addons. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the tips!

you’re very welcome.