If you plan to use Roon and want to take advantage of it's upscaling capabilities, you'll need a fairly robust "something" to run Roon Core. There are a lot of choices out there, personally, I'd stay way from running Roon Core on a laptop or PC and opt for something designed specifically for it.
I started with an Innous Zenith MKII running Logitech Media Server. SQ was excellent and I could use it for whole house stereo combining the Zenith (RAAT) with Raspberry PIs (RAAT) and AirPlay endpoints all into one "zone."
I decided to try Roon and haven't looked back. The Zenith can serve as a Roon endpoint and server. As an endpoint, it is excellent. It works as a server until you use DSP and upscaling at the same time, where I experienced dropouts. To solve that problem, I purchased a sonicTransporter i7 for Roon DSP (without an SSD drive) to host Roon Core. Everything is now working fine.
Had I not purchased the Zenith first and started with Roon, I would have taken a different network media server/streaming approach. Having said that, I'm quite happy with I have and will stick with it for the foreseeable. That combination works well with my DAC (an Audio Mirror Tubadour II SE).