Blue Iris Dedicated Used Computer Check

[Lanhoj]

Hello everyone,

After deciding that I didn't want to use my NAS as a surveillance station, I just got my hands on an old dell xps 8700 unit. It has 8 GB RAM and an i5 4690 CPU. It was $130 so I'm not expecting too much of it but I was wondering if anybody could give me their best guess as to what my upper limitations for this unit would be. For now, I would only be recording 24/7 from an IPC-HDW5831R-ZE. Maybe a couple of old foscam 8910's too.

The unit didn't come with a hard drive, which is fine since I have a ton of old mechanical drives laying around which I was able to use for setup. All my laptops and desktops I've had I always end up upgrading to SSD drives since it makes such a big difference. While the wiki recommends using an SSD drive for running the OS and blue iris, I don't know if this will be that important to me if I really only plan on checking the footage when something happens.

Anyway, any suggestions or tips or answers as to how many cameras I may be able to expect to add on to this system would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again.

 

[SirVenom]

It will do well for 3 cameras for sure. I would consider that load low for that cpu. 8gb ram is ok too. Hard to find the upper limit without knowing your specifics. I have noticed that cpu load is directly related to the megapixels being processed and the features enabled. Are you planning to have blue iris processing montion alerts? Overlays? How many clients connected?Having blueiris and the cameras recording on the same drive will create bottlenecks. It is not recommended. Ssds are cheap these days. Does not have to be a fancy ssd. Wd green ssds do the job. As a reference I run 5 3mp cameras, motion on 4 of them, no overlays and stream to 2 clients on a i7 3770. Cpu load is around 15%. Your i5 4th gen should do well.

 

[Lanhoj]

Thanks for the response. I suppose a $30 120 GB SSD would probably be a pretty good investment for a unit like this if it prevents potential bottlenecks and makes things generally more responsive.

I suppose I really only plan on utilizing as much of Blue Iris' features as I can without compromising its reliability. If I can use it for motion alerts at max megapixels being recorded without any hiccups, sure why not. But it seems like just recording 24/7 is the simplest thing for BI to do.

Something I want to look into is whether or not I can schedule BI to zoom my camera automatically at a certain time every night. I may end up placing my camera at a location that will provide coverage for our front door area in case we have any packages delivered. But, after 10PM or so, we should have already gotten home, no more packages will be delivered, and we have a Ring doorbell that will record if someone comes up to the front door (it doesn't have a good angle if someone were to come from the side at a low angle and nab a package). So, late at night I'd like to have the camera zoom in to get a better view of our mailbox on the street. It might end up being a trial and error kind of thing, and I'm not sure if that's something BI can do.

 

[piconut]

You can see a real world table of Blue Iris users, the number of cameras each user has, the CPU, the RAM, etc. ...And it is searchable and sortable.

Blue Iris Update Helper

That should give you a good idea about how well your system would work given your specs.
This was compiled using Blue Iris Helper made by bp2008.