HW decoding and supported CPUs

[fenderman]

What should my expectation be of power usage on a $500 PC that will run BI well? I've had a hard time finding anything but max power consumption numbers on systems. My hesitation has been that I will spend $500 to save $10/mo - with a 4+ year break even it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend the money buying something new, for $500 I'd be much further ahead putting my money into other things (LEDs, appliances, etc) that will save more power assuming the job is done equally well by both machines. Not challenging opinions here, just looking to try to run the numbers objectively but haven't been able to get a result that makes financial sense yet. Would a good i5 machine with a couple of drives spinning consume 30w, 50w or 100w?

Im guessing you are using two of these processors, http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+X5365+@+3.00GHz
An i5-4590 will outpower those significantly (because of improvements to the processors that are not always evident in the passmark score but more importantly because of intel hardware acceleration)...
Here are some tests i did on a 300 dollar i5-4590
https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/5696-PC-NVR-Power-Consumption-Sample?highlight=platinum
The difference can be hundreds of dollars per year. For example you state 240-280w consumption. Lets average 260.
At 20c a kwh (dont forget to calculate delivery, supply and taxes) that amounts to $454 per year.
A haswell i5 in the link above, even with a few drives added will draw about 50w or $87 per year. The system will pay for itself in a less than a year. You can also sell the old server for a few dollars...though I wouldnt have the heart to. I cringe when I see folks using old power hog servers...the money is going straight to the electric company.

 

[nayr]

they are very efficient space heaters, few things out there convert electricity to heat more efficiently than an old xeon server

but I agree, even in a commercial setting the NVR going down is not really going to cost any money.. its not like loosing email or the website where you can actually account monetary outages every single time there is an outage.. not much need to pay the energy tax for full grade servers.

My Dahua NVR w/2 Disks is under 15w, my old FTP NVR setup was under 7w but only supported one disk... 260W for a NVR is outrageous... 50w is much more reasonable.

 

[TechBill]

With the price on Xeon falling down, it possible to build a massive Xeon server for a very low cost today .....

http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

Check the handbrake result on this server build.

Bill

 

[hbee]

With the price on Xeon falling down, it possible to build a massive Xeon server for a very low cost today .....

http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

Check the handbrake result on this server build.

Bill

Uh, maybe I should upgrade my home Esxi setup (Xeon E3-1240 v2) for this and dump the current E3 as a BlueIris virtual machine. Atleast for the moment. Then maybe upgrade to Dell or HP desktop setup to get the Quicksync. One problem with this is that these must be ordered via Ebay and the shipping could be a significant sum. These seem to be readily available in the US markets but not so in Europe. And especially not here in Finland.

Damn you for linking such builds, I was happy with my current setup .

edit: Now that I've been thinking a bit. Maybe it could be plausible to just virtualize the current desktop PC on the Dual Xeon E5-2670 setup and use that for gaming as well as other stuff. This would free the current desktop for Blueiris and the old E3 Xeon could be used for virtualization (offsite backup) on the same site where the Blueiris setup is. It seems things escalated once again...

 

[bp2008]

With the price on Xeon falling down, it possible to build a massive Xeon server for a very low cost today .....

http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

Check the handbrake result on this server build.

Bill

Interesting. The power consumption is high, but I bet it is that way for all dual CPU servers. That said, even with my $0.05391 per kWh energy rates I don't think I would run that. I just don't run anything requiring that many powerful threads often enough to justify it. I am fine with transcoding a movie taking twice as long if I only do it once a year.

 

[eddiequeue]

Alright, once I saw power consumption that low I was convinced - have a new i5-4590 system on the way, 1/5 of the power and double the CPU benchmark should be a nice step up. Thanks guys!

 

[fenderman]

Alright, once I saw power consumption that low I was convinced - have a new i5-4590 system on the way, 1/5 of the power and double the CPU benchmark should be a nice step up. Thanks guys!

It will actually be more than double with intel hardware acceleration and other cpu improvements over the last 10 years.

 

[eddiequeue]

Just wanted to post an update - got my new i5-4950 system setup and now am using 50w and only 5% CPU utilization. Thanks for all the help + advice here.

 

[Desertsweeper]

Welcome to the forum. Dont waste time upgrading this extreme power hog server. Buy a business class hp/dell with an i5-4590 for $300 and call it a day. You need a cpu that supports intel HD with quicksync.

I am also trying to figure out a replacement for my home power-hog as posted elsewhere in this forum. Having read through this thread I was wondering if I could use the brand-new Core-i7-6700 I have sitting on a shelf (abandoned project) instead of your recommended i5-4590? I see from the Intel specs that it does have "Quicksync" and seems to draw less power? I would buy a mini ITX board and case with a couple of decent drives. Three existing HikVision DS-2CD2032-I's but wanting to expand to 5 now. Blue Iris paid version. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

 

[bp2008]

I was wondering if I could use the brand-new Core-i7-6700 I have sitting on a shelf (abandoned project) instead of your recommended i5-4590?

Absolutely you could. It would be more efficient and faster. The reason we recommend i5-4590 so often around here is because it is the best bang for your buck to buy entire systems based around those CPUs used/refurbished, and the CPU is more than capable of handling what most users require.

 

[Desertsweeper]

Many thanks for the clarification bp2008. I was going to set up an uber 8-core VM box to do all but I think building a small dedicated NVR and a lower powered VM box (I have an HP 54L Micro Server ready for this) is the way forward. Maybe the built-in Intel HD graphics will be supported in a future release of BI. The Intel Xeon CPU I was looking at does not have any on-chip graphics.

 

[fenderman]

Maybe the built-in Intel HD graphics will be supported in a future release of BI. The Intel Xeon CPU I was looking at does not have any on-chip graphics.

Blue iris does support the intel HD, in fact its the only graphics adapter supported for hardware acceleration using intel quicksync.

 

[bp2008]

Quick Sync (which is supported by BI) is part of built-in Intel HD graphics ... just not in all of their products which is why you always need to check Intel's website. Many Xeon CPUs don't have Quick Sync support, but some do. The problem you'll have with a VM is that you won't be able to use the Quick Sync feature through a VM.

 

[Desertsweeper]

Quick Sync (which is supported by BI) is part of built-in Intel HD graphics ... just not in all of their products which is why you always need to check Intel's website. Many Xeon CPUs don't have Quick Sync support, but some do. The problem you'll have with a VM is that you won't be able to use the Quick Sync feature through a VM.

Thank you fenderman and bp2008. This may explain why my current setup maxes out the CPU on my Proliant - not only is it a VM but the Xeon CPU does not have graphics anyway (though I suspect one could pass the the adapter, if it was there, to the VM with Directed VT-d or somesuch). Where can I find out more about how Quick Sync works with BI?

 

[Desertsweeper]

Scrap that, sorry, found fenderman's Jan 6th Post that explains it all...