Biting the bullet on BI.....

[Smilingreen]

Ok, I am going to bite the bullet and get a PC......gawd, that hurts to say that. This PC will be strictly dedicated to BI and Windoze massive real estate OS. It will not have access to the internet. With the latest version of BI, what would be the best machine to secure to run about 10 cameras on BI? I don't want or need some monster tower with winky blinky lights, massive windows on the case and all that crap. Obviously, I will need a video card. Brand & type & version? I am going to put WD Purple in it for the recordings. HP or Dell PC? What version of processor? 16 GB of memory ok or does it like more? Yeah, yeah, I have read the Cliff notes.......I figure one of you guys are going to say that. I am looking for several opinions.

 

[sebastiantombs]

An i7 or newer with 16GB of RAM and Win10/Pro will work and handle expansion easily. Just make sure there are enough bays and connections to support multiple platter drives for storage. It should also have an M2 drive, 256GB or larger for a boot drive. A lot of the business class stuff in SFF won't have that. Dell, HP or Lenovo refurb, off lease business class machines are a good bet. You can also remove a CD/DVD drive, if the case supports one, and install an extra platter drive there instead. Adapter trays will handle the physical part if needed.

As far as a video card, an NVidia card in the 1050/1060 model range will work out really well. They both have enough CUDA cores to handle DeepStack with no problems.

 

[Smilingreen]

An i7 or newer with 16GB of RAM and Win10/Pro will work and handle expansion easily. Just make sure there are enough bays and connections to support multiple platter drives for storage. It should also have an M2 drive, 256GB or larger for a boot drive. A lot of the business class stuff in SFF won't have that. Dell, HP or Lenovo refurb, off lease business class machines are a good bet. You can also remove a CD/DVD drive, is the case supports one, and install an extra platter drive there instead. Adapter trays will handle the physical part if needed.

As far as a video card, an NVidia card in the 1050/1060 model range will work out really well. They both have enough CUDA cores to handle DeepStack with no problems.

I have a SFF ASUS that is about 10 years old that I have BI 4 on, but it never really had enough gonads to handle more than 2 cameras without overheating.

 

[sebastiantombs]

That's the problem with SFF. Sometimes they use a mobile processor. Mobile processors throttle speed with heat caused by load as in a laptop. With sub streams it's not as much of a problem but playback can overload a mobile processor.

 

[wittaj]

Or go an even cheaper route with an even older machine LOL.

Folks here run 50 cameras on a 4th generation CPU at 30ish% and another member just reported 18 cams on a 3rd generation at 12% CPU. I probably wouldn't go with a 3rd gen unless you already had one floating around. But an off-lease 4th gen at the right price, sure.

If you do every optimization in the wiki, an older machine can get by just fine.

Video card is only needed if you plan to run DeepStack, but even then it isn't a requirement. I was getting sub 1 second times with just the CPU on a 4th gen.

If you have cameras with AI in them, then you may not even need to run DeepStack.

Get Win10 Pro and you can turn off Windows updates and then at that point it is simply a powerful NVR that you don't have to mess with Windows again LOL.

 

[The Automation Guy]

Why do you need a video card?

I use an older i7-6700 computer with 16gb RAM that I bought off E-bay for around $280 shipped (in 2020 before the COVID price increases). It's a Lenove ThinkCentre M900 which is a small tower form factor. It allows me to put a couple of drives in it, yet still have a relatively small size. I use the built in graphics and it works just fine. I currently have 9 cameras running on BI and the computer is barely breaking a sweat. I could double the number of cameras and probably still use less than 50% of the computer resources.

The only potential drawback to getting something like this is the recent announcement by Microsoft that you can't install Windows 11 on a computer running anything older than a 8th generation Intel chip (or comparable AMD chip). If they don't back off that policy (and I suspect they will in the end), I'll have to stay on Windows 10 even after it is EOL. That's probably not a huge deal with this computer because like you I have it running BI only and it doesn't access the internet.

PS - I just checked my EBay history and realized that I bought another i7-6700 computer (A Dell 3620 Precision Tower with 32gb of RAM and no OS) for $276 shipped just in Jan 2022, so these types computers can be bought for less than $300 shipped if you are patient. I had to replace my automation and SageTV server and this computer works really well for that use as well.

 

[ccssid]

I was running 10 cameras (no video card..used igpu) with i7 3770k and 16gb ram with absolutely no issues.

 

[wittaj]

You can even disable the internal GPU and it works fine.

I think the newest updates of BI is more stable if you do not use Hardware Acceleration. And with the substreams, it is negligible - the CPU% needed to offload the video to the graphics card is equal to or exceeds the savings of moving it to the GPU. YMMV

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

Folks here run 50 cameras on a 4th generation CPU at 30ish% and another member just reported 18 cams on a 3rd generation at 12% CPU. I probably wouldn't go with a 3rd gen unless you already had one floating around. But an off-lease 4th gen at the right price, sure.

I just don't buy it when people post stuff like that. Either that, or they never use the system to view cameras. I have an 8700K with all cams in the signature sitting at 15fps and sit at near 40% CPU with spikes to 80%. I even re-installed everything when I had that crashing issue (Turned out to be a BI bug with clones) and CPU sits the same.

I have a feeling its like reading the MPG Threads on truck forums, every post is highly inflated/deflated to look better, and pictures/screenshots are timed for the best possible number on the screen

 

[wittaj]

LOL - I guess you don't wanna see my system then....

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

Do you make heavy use of UI3? The only thing I've noticed is that I have at least 2 streams up of UI3 at any given time. Perhaps that's why I have much higher CPU

 

[wittaj]

I remote desktop in most of the time, but using the BI app or UI3 runs lower CPU than remote desktop. But I do run the resolution low on UI3 and figure I can full screen it if I need better resolution.

 

[Mike A.]

Yeah, sounds like something still isn't quite right or not optimized with yours. Granted, 50 cams on a 4th gen is going to have to be very limited as far as cams, data rates, etc. So that's not a real good benchmark these days.

I run 17 cams including 4K @ 30 FPS/12240, several 4MP all running 20 FPS/8192, a bunch of others that I moved up to 20 FPS and higher rates after substreams became available. My i7-6700 sits in the low- to mid-teens when idle. Probably mid-20s when doing something normal. If I load up the 4K cam for single-view with a few other instances of UI3 running on other machines and a RDP session into the server running with the BI console up at the same time, I might get it to hit a little over 50 at times. Don't think that I've ever seen a spike to 60 no matter what was happening.

Edit to add:

I take that back... Trying it again now as described above with however I have things now configured it will spike up to mid-60s and then settles down to mid-high 40s.

And another qualifier is that I don't run DeepStack for whatever effect that has.

 

[SpacemanSpiff]

Plenty of sources for used machines suitable for your next BI server. Sometimes the dell outlet has some good deals

 

[iwanttosee]

I bought a used $30 Lenovo M93p computer that has an i5 4570 cpu with 8GB of ram to run BlueIris and CPU DeepStack AND two virtual Linux OS (Home Assistant and Raspberry OS) to monitor nine cameras, five 5MP and four 2MP. It was great, except for the occasional 100% CPU cycles due to DeepStack. So I waited until I found a cheap $60 P620 with 512 Cuda cores to move the DeepStack to GPU. After I installed the video card and the huge Nvidia libraries of files required, my computer RAM went way up so I had to get another 8GB for the computer.

So, I have maybe $200 into my computer with the purchase of BlueIris running 9 cameras and two virtual OSes. Average about 30% CPU and 12GB of usage. I imagine I can add a few more cameras without stressing the computer too much. Average power use is about 50 watt on my setup.

Check your local classified for Lenovo ThinkCentre (Thinkcenter), Dell Optiplex, and HP Elite Desk business class computer. Basically look for on any SSF or bigger computer with USB 3.0 (blue one) then do a quick research on them to make sure they are 4th gen cpu or later and you should be fine at 10 cameras. If you want DeepStack then you should get a higher end CPU and/or a Nvidia GPU videocard.

 

[wittaj]

I have a 4th gen SFF I got off the refurb list of a business lease with over 30 cameras ranging from 2MP to 8MP, running OpenALPR for two cameras, the plate utility to log the plates, and DeepStack on 5 cameras, with most of the cameras running at 15FPS, but a few are down in the 10-12 range and one is at 20FPS. Recording 24/7 substream with mainstream on triggers and not running hardware acceleration.

I have optimized the system fully to the Wiki. At night it will sip in the single digits. In the daytime it is in the teens. It will jump with OpenALPR in the daytime.

I rebooted my machine last week and I leave this program running to monitor temps, CPU%, memory, etc. It shows what it is at now and the max it has seen. I wish it showed the min also, but oh well. I am remote desktop in and that adds a few percent, but you can see it is sitting in the teens during the day and had a max of 65% for the past week. And I am sure that was the snowy day with a lot of motion and OpenALPR triggering at the same time. Quick up and quick down.

So yeah, I think 50 cameras at 30% on a fully optimized 4th gen is possible.

 

[Rob2020]

You can even disable the internal GPU and it works fine.

I think the newest updates of BI is more stable if you do not use Hardware Acceleration. And with the substreams, it is negligible - the CPU% needed to offload the video to the graphics card is equal to or exceeds the savings of moving it to the GPU. YMMV

Running a Ryzen 2700 with 16GB RAM, and 4 Dahua Cams, my video card is a 1650 Super and it is NOT enabled, I noticed the above statement to be accurate, enable the video card and the GPU is offset but obviously now I am drawing on the card.

I have not done a detailed analysis, all I know, runs 100% with no hiccups on the CPU, usage around 8 - 10% with 4 cams recording 24/7

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

I have a 4th gen SFF I got off the refurb list of a business lease with over 30 cameras ranging from 2MP to 8MP, running OpenALPR for two cameras, the plate utility to log the plates, and DeepStack on 5 cameras, with most of the cameras running at 15FPS, but a few are down in the 10-12 range and one is at 20FPS. Recording 24/7 with mainstream on triggers and not running hardware acceleration.

I have optimized the system fully to the Wiki. At night it will sip in the single digits. In the daytime it is in the teens. It will jump with OpenALPR in the daytime.

I rebooted my machine last week and I leave this program running to monitor temps, CPU%, memory, etc. It shows what it is at now and the max it has seen. I wish it showed the min also, but oh well. I am remote desktop in and that adds a few percent, but you can see it is sitting in the teens during the day and had a max of 65% for the past week. And I am sure that was the snowy day with a lot of motion and OpenALPR triggering at the same time. Quick up and quick down.

So yeah, I think 50 cameras at 30% on a fully optimized 4th gen is possible.

Using sub streams?

 

[wittaj]

Absolutely using substreams. The number one big CPU saver in the wiki!

That is how someone can run 50 cams on a 4th gen!