Is Dell mostly recommended for dedicated BI?

Curlyp

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Hello,

I'm looking to purchase a dedicated, but not overly expense computer to run BI. I'm thinking max cams would be 15.

In the wiki or cliff notes, it mentioned to not build your own PC. Picking up a refurbished computer would be much cheaper.

With that said, is it recommended to go with a refurbished Dell OptiPlex? If so, where do you typically find the best deals and what model? I'm assuming I want nothing less than 9th gen processor?

Thanks!
 

fenderman

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Hello,

I'm looking to purchase a dedicated, but not overly expense computer to run BI. I'm thinking max cams would be 15.

In the wiki or cliff notes, it mentioned to not build your own PC. Picking up a refurbished computer would be much cheaper.

With that said, is it recommended to go with a refurbished Dell OptiPlex? If so, where do you typically find the best deals and what model? I'm assuming I want nothing less than 9th gen processor?

Thanks!
The brand is not important. Its the feature set. what processor? windows pro vs home. how many drives can it hold. Note there are lots of variations with respect to processors. 9th gen means nothing 9th gen i3u is different than 9th gen i7. 15 cams means nothing. 15 1080p cameras running at 15fps will be very different than 15 4k cameras running at 30 fps. Using AI will require even more power. With certain generations of processors there is a huge jump in performance, with others not so much.
 

fenderman

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I run 30 cameras on old refurbished I7 4790 HP desktop from recomendations here a couple years ago.
many on Ebay for cheap. Dell and HP
It is important to be careful with such representations. For example you could not run 30 4k cams on a system like even without AI. Add AI and it will choke with more than one or two cameras triggering. This systems will also not support w11 when windows 10 is EOL in two years.
 

Flintstone61

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I hve bought probably 15 Dell's over the years ( laptops desktops etc,) from ebay.
Just do a little homework on the seller. If they sold 40,000 items, and have bad communication and a lower seller rating, keep looking for your product, but find a good seller.
heres one I bought a 20" monitor from in 2022

I got comfortable with Dell towers over the years, and liked the 7020 Mid Tower with its ATX power supply.
Then they introduced the 9020 ( 4th Gen intel i.e i5-4590) mid-Tower, with all its drive bays, and so forth but they used a NON-Atx power supply Pinout.
And in order to get my nvidia gt1060 powered correctly, I had to research another Dell part# by searching on Dell support forums, and ebay and some other places.
I discovered that the Dell Precision of the same generation had the same Pin-out power supply, but rated higher for hungry graphics cards.
It ran my 7 cams ok, when i got introduced to blue iris, but that was 3 years ago or so.
I wanted to try an 8th gen dell, but as they made changes to the Optiplex case, you could see they were moving away from 3.5" HDD support, heading towards SSD's and 2.5" disk support.
Which is fine for a Corporate world office machine. But for a bigger BI setup, if you wanted 2 drives and 20+ cams they weren't natively supporting the 2nd drive.

Then the Windows 11 issue cropped up. TPM 2.0 garbage.

So I found out that 8th Gen Intel chips from the big manufacturers like Lenovo, Dell, Hp, etc....would be w11 compliant.
So I learned on the forum about the Hp Elitedesk. and the bonus with this SFF PC is that they stuffed 2 3.5" bays into that little machine.
Not that everybody needs 2 HDD's for BI.
Then I discovered the Dell Precision 3630 ( 8th gen chip) with 3-3.5" bays, onboard SSD, and a PSU supporting Nvidia rtx 2070's etc....
SO now I have the i5-8500 Elitedesk running at a condo.
and the Dell 3630 running at home.
 
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Flintstone61

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Curlyp

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hp elitedesk g4 800 sff i5-8500 is the better, off-lease corporate machine. tooless design easy to service.
Thanks for the recommendation. I will look into it. Do these machines have room for an nivida graphics card and second NIC?

The brand is not important. Its the feature set. what processor? windows pro vs home. how many drives can it hold. Note there are lots of variations with respect to processors. 9th gen means nothing 9th gen i3u is different than 9th gen i7. 15 cams means nothing. 15 1080p cameras running at 15fps will be very different than 15 4k cameras running at 30 fps. Using AI will require even more power. With certain generations of processors there is a huge jump in performance, with others not so much.
Makes sense. Thanks. I have windows 10 pro available and would prefer to use it over home for the additional features.

I don't have any 4K cameras (yet, but not sure if I need them). I purchased one IPC-T5442T-ZE from @EMPIRETECANDY to test out. The deceription says I can run it at 4MP (2688 × 1520) @30 fps or 2MP @60fps. What would you recommend?

I'm new to BI so I don't know if using AI is worth it or not. I need to get my dedicated BI pc first, then I can play around with it. I thought I read somewhere that sub stream (i think that was the word used) was much better. My apologies if I misspoke.

I hve bought probably 15 Dell's over the years ( laptops desktops etc,) from ebay.
Just do a little homework on the seller. If they sold 40,000 items, and have bad communication and a lower seller rating, keep looking for your product, but find a good seller.
heres one I bought a 20" monitor from in 2022

I got comfortable with Dell towers over the years, and liked the 7020 Mid Tower with its ATX power supply.
Then they introduced the 9020 ( 4th Gen intel i.e i5-4590) mid-Tower, with all its drive bays, and so forth but they used a NON-Atx power supply Pinout.
And in order to get my nvidia gt1060 powered correctly, I had to research another Dell part# by searching on Dell support forums, and ebay and some other places.
I discovered that the Dell Precision of the same generation had the same Pin-out power supply, but rated higher for hungry graphics cards.
It ran my 7 cams ok, when i got introduced to blue iris, but that was 3 years ago or so.
I wanted to try an 8th gen dell, but as they made changes to the Optiplex case, you could see they were moving away from 3.5" HDD support, heading towards SSD's and 2.5" disk support.
Which is fine for a Corporate world office machine. But for a bigger BI setup, if you wanted 2 drives and 20+ cams they weren't natively supporting the 2nd drive.

Then the Windows 11 issue cropped up. TPM 2.0 garbage.

So I found out that 8th Gen Intel chips from the big manufacturers like Lenovo, Dell, Hp, etc....would be w11 compliant.
So I learned on the forum about the Hp Elitedesk. and the bonus with this SFF PC is that they stuffed 2 3.5" bays into that little machine.
Not that everybody needs 2 HDD's for BI.
Then I discovered the Dell Precision 3630 ( 8th gen chip) with 3-3.5" bays, onboard SSD, and a PSU supporting Nvidia rtx 2070's etc....
SO now I have the i5-8500 Elitedesk running at a condo.
and the Dell 3630 running at home.
Appreciate it. Yikes, that sounds like it was a pain. I would prefer a more compatible system that is easy to swap out components if needed.

Yes, I do not want Windows 11 at all! I have windows 10 pro and will disable the automatic updates.

I'll look into the Dell 3630 and the 5060. I am assuming I want a machine that is powerful enough to support the features of BI / cameras, but is energy efficient at the same time. I know I don't want a machine that's going to be power hungry.


Thank you for the picture representation.


heres one on ebay, don't worry about the NO OS, you want to perform a clean install using the MS Windows media creation tool with a USB stick.
Thank you!
 
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wittaj

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You may not need a graphics card. They are only needed if you plan to run a lot of cameras with BI AI. For most of us the camera built-in AI is more than enough.

If you don't want a machine that is power hungry, then don't add a GPU LOL.

Plus look at all the issues folks are having trying to get GPUs to work. If you only need BI AI for one or two cams, the CPU version is much better.

As I said the AI in the camera may be more than sufficient for your needs without needing CPAI. Do you need the orange box around every object? Do you want to identify animals or logos? Or is just human or vehicle sufficient.

The camera AI is useful to many people, but BI has way more motion setting granularity than the cameras, and some people need that additional detail, especially if wanting AI for more than a car or person. For folks that want AI and alerts on animals or specifically a UPS truck then they need the additional AI.

There isn't really a best practice because every field of view is different and use case and needs are different.

To many here, BI motion without AI is more than adequate for what they do.

To many here, camera AI is more than adequate for what they do.

To many here, using the BI AI adds additional functionality that the above alone can not do.

While some of that third party stuff is cool like tagging was it a dog or a bear, I don't need all that fancy stuff. If my camera triggers BI to tag an alert for human or vehicle and BI can accomplish what I need by way of a text or email or push or whatever, that is sufficient for my needs. I just want to be alerted if a person or vehicle is on my property and the camera AI does a fine job with that.

However, I do run BI AI on one camera so that it knocks out headlight shine so that the alert image includes the vehicle. The camera AI will trigger for a car, but the alert image was always just the headlights.

The true test....I have found the AI of the cameras to work even in a freakin blizzard....imagine how much the CPU would be maxing out sending all the snow pictures for analysis to CodeProject LOL. My non-AI cams in BI were triggering all night. This picture was ran through Deepstack (without the IVS or red lines on it) and it failed to recognize a person in the picture, but the camera AI did. This pic says it all and the video had the red box over it even in complete white out on the screen:

1684590844857.png





These are surveillance cams, not Hollywood cams. Most here run at 15 FPS. Running 30FPS just means you go thru your storage at double the rate.

Shutter speed is more important than FPS

Look at all the threads where people came here with a jitter in the video or video dropping signal or IVS missing motion or the SD card doesn't overwrite and they were running 30FPS and when people tell them to drop the FPS and they dropped the FPS to 15FPS the camera became stable and they could actual freeze frame the image to get a clean capture. The goal of these cameras are to capture a perp, not capture smooth motion. When we see the news, are they showing the video or a freeze frame screen shot? Nobody cares if it isn't butter smooth...getting the features to make an ID is the important factor. As always, YMMV...

Further, these types of cameras are not GoPro or Hollywood type cameras that offer slow-mo capabilities and other features. They "offer" 30FPS and 60FPS to appease the general public that thinks that is what they need, but you will not find many of us here running more than 15 FPS; and movies are shot at 24 FPS, so anything above that is a waste of storage space for what these cameras are used for. If 24 FPS works for the big screen, I think 15 FPS is more than enough for phones and tablets and most monitors LOL. Many of my cameras are running at 12FPS.

Watch these, for most of us, it isn't annoying until below 10FPS


 

Flintstone61

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The Small form factor machines can usually support a low profile graphics card, but nothing that requires a 500Watt PSU, or the additional wiring.
But sometimes it's either/ or with add-on cards. theres room for one PCI-e device but not 2. Depends on the model.
You'd have to look at Dell support under manuals/.PDF to see a graphical picture of the motherboard.
At some point people here had been using the Nvidia Quadro low profile cards.
 

Curlyp

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You may not need a graphics card. They are only needed if you plan to run a lot of cameras with BI AI. For most of us the camera built-in AI is more than enough.

If you don't want a machine that is power hungry, then don't add a GPU LOL.

Plus look at all the issues folks are having trying to get GPUs to work. If you only need BI AI for one or two cams, the CPU version is much better.

As I said the AI in the camera may be more than sufficient for your needs without needing CPAI. Do you need the orange box around every object? Do you want to identify animals or logos? Or is just human or vehicle sufficient.

The camera AI is useful to many people, but BI has way more motion setting granularity than the cameras, and some people need that additional detail, especially if wanting AI for more than a car or person. For folks that want AI and alerts on animals or specifically a UPS truck then they need the additional AI.

There isn't really a best practice because every field of view is different and use case and needs are different.

To many here, BI motion without AI is more than adequate for what they do.

To many here, camera AI is more than adequate for what they do.

To many here, using the BI AI adds additional functionality that the above alone can not do.

While some of that third party stuff is cool like tagging was it a dog or a bear, I don't need all that fancy stuff. If my camera triggers BI to tag an alert for human or vehicle and BI can accomplish what I need by way of a text or email or push or whatever, that is sufficient for my needs. I just want to be alerted if a person or vehicle is on my property and the camera AI does a fine job with that.

However, I do run BI AI on one camera so that it knocks out headlight shine so that the alert image includes the vehicle. The camera AI will trigger for a car, but the alert image was always just the headlights.

The true test....I have found the AI of the cameras to work even in a freakin blizzard....imagine how much the CPU would be maxing out sending all the snow pictures for analysis to CodeProject LOL. My non-AI cams in BI were triggering all night. This picture was ran through Deepstack (without the IVS or red lines on it) and it failed to recognize a person in the picture, but the camera AI did. This pic says it all and the video had the red box over it even in complete white out on the screen:

View attachment 163593





These are surveillance cams, not Hollywood cams. Most here run at 15 FPS. Running 30FPS just means you go thru your storage at double the rate.

Shutter speed is more important than FPS

Look at all the threads where people came here with a jitter in the video or video dropping signal or IVS missing motion or the SD card doesn't overwrite and they were running 30FPS and when people tell them to drop the FPS and they dropped the FPS to 15FPS the camera became stable and they could actual freeze frame the image to get a clean capture. The goal of these cameras are to capture a perp, not capture smooth motion. When we see the news, are they showing the video or a freeze frame screen shot? Nobody cares if it isn't butter smooth...getting the features to make an ID is the important factor. As always, YMMV...

Further, these types of cameras are not GoPro or Hollywood type cameras that offer slow-mo capabilities and other features. They "offer" 30FPS and 60FPS to appease the general public that thinks that is what they need, but you will not find many of us here running more than 15 FPS; and movies are shot at 24 FPS, so anything above that is a waste of storage space for what these cameras are used for. If 24 FPS works for the big screen, I think 15 FPS is more than enough for phones and tablets and most monitors LOL. Many of my cameras are running at 12FPS.

Watch these, for most of us, it isn't annoying until below 10FPS


I appreciate the advice and will check out the videos.

Haha, no I'm not going after Hollywood videos! I am looking for eyes and some hears around the house, barn, etc., when I'm not home. Being able to see who comes up to the door or walks in the yard.

I live in the country and have acreage with a very long driveway.

I'm assuming based on the information you provided, 15fps is more than enough. No I don't need orange boxes around things or to see logos. I might try AI on a camera or two, but from what you suggested, it's not needed.

Yes, graphics cards are power hungry! I was referring to power hungry of a Dell or HP server or even my gaming computer (12core i9, Nvidia 4080, all water cooled).

Is it better to get a machine that has the space for a GPU and second NIC vs not having one and limit my scalability?
 

Gimmons

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I bought a pair of hp elitedesk 800 gen 2 i5-6500s from a country auction for $25. I was going to use them to host monitors, with BI on a computer I used to use for video editing. I put a BI trial on one of the county boxes, and it ran really well. Nine cameras, mostly 4 mp, one 8 mp. No AI.

Because this is doing what I need at a much lower power draw than the big editing box, it has become my BI computer.
 

Gimmons

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By the bye, there are a lot of vids out there showing how to add W11 to older computers not on the "approved" list by editing the registry. Microsoft is widely expected to make this an "official" thing at some point so as not to leave its large corporate and govt clients stranded.
 
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