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Cool, thanks for this. I have been looking at NUCs but I feel that I would probably always want the Roon Nucleus as a total fit and forget optimised solution, so I'll perhaps go for that once I've given the laptop thing a go.
Stevethecoffee-
Of course I had considered the Nucleus, reading the white paper they published there is very little difference between the Nucleus and an NUC running ROCK. The Nucleus has a few things disabled, direct audio output and wifi as an example. There's a chance I might want to use my NUC as a portable Roon setup in the future so Wifi for control and a direct audio output appealed to me. The Nucleus is based on either an early series i3 or i7 for the Nucleus + so they are pretty expensive options although the turnkey approach is appealing of course.
Probably represented better value before the wider availability of second hand NUC's and a choice of fanless cases. I've not put it in a fanless case yet but I will at some point.
Airhead
I've just started with an NUC7i5 running Roon ROCK having been running Roon on a computer. Your example would be different a bit different as the laptop is still running an operating system and Roon runs on top of that. I don't use any upsampling but I do run convolution filters and the there are a lot of individual room speakers.
I've enjoyed the freeing up of resources on my main computer and the Roon remotes controlling the whole house have been a bit more responsive with Roon running on a separate computer.
If you can spring for an NUC I would recommend that, otherwise definitely try the laptop. I have a second system which runs off a laptop and that seems pretty stable although it's only running one endpoint.
Just don't lose sight of the fact that most RF interference is at levels so low it really doesn't factor in the enjoyment of almost any source. Any audio transmitted via ethernet or wifi should be free of added rf interference though.