Help picking hardware for 64 ip 2MP 25 fps cameras

kvisetph

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Hello guys,

I am new to this community so if I would like to apologize in advance if I post this question in a wrong forum.

Currently, my company has 64 IP 2MP cameras connected to 4 NVRs (16 cams/NVR). However, our NVRs performance are so unstable e.g. at least 2 cameras/NVR always disconnect everyday. Then, we found Blue Iris on the internet and it seems to be a good solution to our problem.

So my question to all the experts out there; What hardware do I need to get to support all 64 IP cams 2MP 25 FPS (Can be reduce to 15 FPS).

We do not have any idle machines so we will need to buy one but we have around 2.5K USD budget for Machine + OS.

Right now, we are considering buying a new machine with Intel i9 as recommended on this forum.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 

cyberwolf_uk

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Not sure what make of cameras and what NVR you are using. But as much as I love BlueIris and would either go for a better enterprise NVR and think about your settings, do you need 25fps for example or think about using 2 different BlueIris servers running 32 cameras per system.
 

kvisetph

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Thank you for replying. Our cameras are Innekt brands; I believe they are Thai local brand based-off of hikvision.

About FPS, I read somewhere that 15FPS is sufficient for most applications, so we could do 15 FPS as well
 

sebastiantombs

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If they are Hikvision based cameras they should, and I stress the word should, work with a Hikvsion NVR. Personally, I'd go with two used business class machines running Blue Iris, two licenses, on Win10/Pro because it will work with almost any brand of camera. Using sub streams and hardware acceleration with Blue Iris makes that pretty easy to do without having to worry about processing power as much. A 6th generation or newer i7 with 32GB of RAM will handle a 32 camera load without any problems.
 

bp2008

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64 1080p cameras at 15 FPS each comes to 1990 megapixels per second. That is a lot. I tried to max out an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X and couldn't break past 1900 MP/s due to what was probably a memory bandwidth limit.

If you run all 64 cameras with sub streams enabled though ("D1" resolution at 15 FPS), that will reduce the constant load to under 400 megapixels per second. That should run just fine on one Intel i7-6700 or better system. I agree with the others that it is probably better to split the load onto two BI servers. You will get some redundancy this way and you can run the cameras at higher frame rates.

You'll probably want at least an i7-6700 in each system with 16 GB of RAM (ideally in a dual channel configuration). At least, that would be a good choice if you lived in the USA. I have no idea what the used PC market is like in Thailand. If used PCs of at least this spec are not cost-effective, then feel free to buy or build new systems. If you buy new, choose a CPU that scores over 10,000 on CPU Mark here. There is a lot of old advice on this forum about only choosing Intel CPUs with Quick Sync Video so you can use hardware acceleration. Ignore it. It is hardly relevant when you buy a modern CPU made in the last few years, because AMD's greater efficiency should make up for the lack of hardware accelerated video decoding. Intel hardware acceleration is also a bit less stable than plain software decoding, so you may be saving yourself some trouble by ignoring it.
 

kvisetph

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64 1080p cameras at 15 FPS each comes to 1990 megapixels per second. That is a lot. I tried to max out an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X and couldn't break past 1900 MP/s due to what was probably a memory bandwidth limit.

If you run all 64 cameras with sub streams enabled though ("D1" resolution at 15 FPS), that will reduce the constant load to under 400 megapixels per second. That should run just fine on one Intel i7-6700 or better system. I agree with the others that it is probably better to split the load onto two BI servers. You will get some redundancy this way and you can run the cameras at higher frame rates.

You'll probably want at least an i7-6700 in each system with 16 GB of RAM (ideally in a dual channel configuration). At least, that would be a good choice if you lived in the USA. I have no idea what the used PC market is like in Thailand. If used PCs of at least this spec are not cost-effective, then feel free to buy or build new systems. If you buy new, choose a CPU that scores over 10,000 on CPU Mark here. There is a lot of old advice on this forum about only choosing Intel CPUs with Quick Sync Video so you can use hardware acceleration. Ignore it. It is hardly relevant when you buy a modern CPU made in the last few years, because AMD's greater efficiency should make up for the lack of hardware accelerated video decoding. Intel hardware acceleration is also a bit less stable than plain software decoding, so you may be saving yourself some trouble by ignoring it.
Thank you. My boss kinda want to use 1 machines but will definitely try to convince him for 2 machines if our budget allow
 
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