Building a BI Machine - Specs

[spyfly81]

I am sure this has been asked before however I can't seem to find an answer, anyway...

Is there a true spec sheet when building a BI machine, such as use a i5 for this many cameras and i7 for this many, how about memory BI doesn't seem to be a memory hog more of a processor hog

the machine I am looking to build currently will support 6 to 8 cameras to start and maybe grow to 12 down the road

Thanks

 

[fenderman]

There is no hard and fast rule because there are many variables...Total Megapixles has a greater impact than total cameras...other variables include using direct to disc or not, live monitoring or running as as service, FPS, etc....
5-8 3mp cameras generally a modern forth generation i5-haswell (not first generation systems) if using direct to disk...I would recommend the i7-haswell when you can, they are not that much more expensive.
I buy business class dell/hp/lenovo regularly, with the latest haswell processors and 3 year next business day warranties for 300-400 for the i5 and 500-600 for the i7 haswells...
4gb of ram will suffice for 99 percent of installations...when you start using lots of cams over 15-20 or so it starts needing more...8gb and the 64bit Blue iris and you will be set for life...

 

[bp2008]

Fenderman is absolutely right. i7 is not much more expensive and usually worth the added cost. 4GB of ram is fine for most installs if no other RAM-hungry programs are running on the system.

My Blue Iris tends to run at 2.5 GB of memory usage with 22 active cameras, 70 megapixels total at 5 FPS average. Normally I just run 20 of those cams (66 megapixels) which uses 2.2 GB of memory at about 35-40% CPU usage with no remote viewers connected.

Now I am sure I could run this same load on an i5, but it would nearly max out the system to do so, and remote viewing might actually push it over the top. The extra power of the i7 lets me run my BlueIrisView (java app) for remote view, which doubles my CPU usage on the server, putting it around 80%. This is high, but still enough for one or two more remote viewers as long as they are using the web interface and not the BlueIrisView app. Now to be fair, most people do not use my java app for remote view so they do not necessarily need to keep CPU usage so low. A normal remote viewer using the web interface will use much less CPU. So if I have just one connected remote viewer using the web interface, my CPU usage is about 51%.