Question on CPU

[Overcast451]

I think this CPU will work just fine for my needs - but I wanted to ask as I'm putting together a custom DVR/Media PC. The media demands will be very very light, so I don't anticipate much CPU usage outside of recording video - for the most part. It may serve up to three DLNA stream *at most*.

Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake
I was planning on 32GB of RAM - but I'm thinking 16GB would be just fine.

I read up on the WD hard disks; the purple seem best for this - but there was some mention on another forum that the NAS Red drives should be able to handle 4 cameras no problem. I'll probably do a RAID5 with three 4TB disks, I was planning on the red NAS drives.

I'm not sure where I'll go on video, I might do a discreet card when I upgrade the nVidia GT760 in mine, until then - I'll probably use on-board video.

My plan is for 4 cameras, at 1080 - possibly 6 at some point in the future; 24/7 monitoring.

Would that be enough horsepower you think?

 

[zebrock]

I personally would never use my nvr pc for anything else but an nvr pc.

Hypothetically, what happens when you're chillin on the couch streaming a blu-ray and someone breaks into your car at the same time and your recorded video is pixelated because your CPU resources are being used on the streaming? Your entire setup becomes worthless.

Bad idea.

Just my opinion though.... YMMV

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N930A using Tapatalk

 

[aristobrat]

The thing about the discreet card, .. if it disables the on-board video that Blue Iris uses for hardware acceleration of H.264 streams, that might be a problem.

For RAM/CPU, ... I'm running an older i7-3770, and with seven cameras (five 1080 @ 20 FPS, one 3MP @ 20 FPS, one virtual cam that I use to do a current weather overlay on), my BI box is running at about 10-15% CPU total with 3 GB of RAM total used. That's with nobody RDP'ed in or watching BI remotely. Goes up about a few % per user using the web/smartphone interfaces watching stuff.

I'd think 16GB of RAM would be more than enough, and that your CPU would also be fine, at least for BI and four cameras. Never played around with media stuff on a PC, so not sure how much impact transcoding files would have on the CPU.

 

[bp2008]

A dedicated machine really is best -- you never ever want Blue Iris to lack in resources.

That CPU is fine for 4-6 1080p cameras, even if you run them at 30 fps.

Onboard graphics is fine for Blue Iris. Nvidia cards may reduce CPU usage slightly when the GUI is open but that is all the good you'll get out of it and I won't even guarantee you'll notice the difference.

On a side note, since you are planning to build a large RAID 5 you should be aware of this: Bonus Tip - Unrecoverable Errors in RAID 5

 

[Overcast451]

I'll double check that system board.. I know the one I'm currently using (I might just get another for this..) has the option to disable on-board video if PCI video is used, or leave them both enabled. Thanks for the tip, that's something I didn't consider. I haven't purchased BlueIris or anything yet - but that's the one I'm planning on using.

I'll just have to test if the DLNA streaming impacts performance at all, like you mentioned - especially when transcoding. If it does - I've been using my PC for a DLNA server, so I could just continue doing that. But I do use a very light weight DLNA server and even if I'm playing something like Fallout 4, the DLNA and CPU are both smooth - that being said, I've never actually monitored it's resource load when it's streaming and/or trans-coding. All the same, I'll get the streams going and see how the CPU load is over time with perfmon - that'll let me know if I have any room to spare. Like you said - I don't want something happening and not have good video of it because the system was busy with something else.

And on the RAID5 - yeah, I've had one at work fail during a re-build... it's quite rare, but certainly possible. Honestly, the reason I considered a RAID 5 was because it was cheaper per GB to get three 4TB drives than to get two 8TB drives - but not by much. And the one that failed at work was a SAS SCSI array, which is far more dependable than a RAID on a consumer grade system board..

Then I started geeking out going down tech rabbit holes - and want to add to that question on RAID1 vs RAID5.. as I didn't consider this either:

RAID-5 (and other parity / data schemes, such as RAID-4, RAID-6, even-odd, and line-parity) never reached the promise of RAID, nor can, because of a fatal flaw known as RAID-5 write hole. Whenever you update the data in a RAID range, you also need to update the parity so that the application of the logical operator XOR to all the disks results in zero - it is this equation that allows to reconstruct the data in case of a disk failure . The problem is that there is no way to update two or more disks atomically, so RAID bands can be damaged during a crash or a power outage.​

Which then got me thinking - a power failure could be due to anything (potentially even an event where a few seconds of video might be critical) and it would increase the risk of data loss using the RAID5 over a RAID1 as well. I suppose I could get a UPS too and I might at some point, but it'll be enough on my budget just to get the PC, POE Switch, and a few cameras.. lol.

I think between the extra power for three drives as opposed to two, along with higher risk of data loss if there's a power failure, and no real significant gain on redundancy on a two Disk RAID1 vs. a three Disk RAID5.. I'll go RAID1. If I was buying a used server with a RAID controller and battery backed cache, it might be different..

Thanks a bunch. And for what it's worth, one 'requirement' I had for the software was a good tech forum