I'm not sure I understand why you would buy Blue Iris *and* an NVR. Blue Iris is NVR software you use on a PC to turn your PC into an NVR. Can you elaborate on your decision to do this? Do you want the NVR as a permanent stand by/backup and the Blue Iris software as more of a notifications...
I don't need the storage on this application because I have a dedicated NVR with 4TB of storage for "overall footage capture". I'm evaluating Blue Iris and Sighthound both and their application is more for meaningful notifications, where I will go look at the clip sooner than later. If need...
Also, "won't work without lots of tweaking" can you be more specific about why you said this? I installed it "out of the box" and it "just works". Are you using some handed down for generations Win7 Ult key from the internet? The last time I saw Windows 7 Ultimate was at the Microsoft movie...
I have several boxes I've been testing, and so far I've been extremely happy with the performance of the i7 NUC models with a high performing disk IO such as PCIe M.2 drives. What the OP went with will surely work well :)
Could you provide some more detail about the configuration you want to/were running? I have the 6I7KYK with 32GB of memory and two M.2 drives in RAID 0 for 1TB of space, and so far I'm very happy with the performance but I am not going over 8 cameras or so. CPU usage swings between 3 and 25%.