So when I first installed my 8 cameras (4MP Hiks) last year, I didn't have a computer to run them with. I had no budget at the time to buy one, so I re-purposed my gaming PC, which wasn't getting much use. It's a bit old, but has an i7-2600K and 16GB of RAM, so it was good enough.
Fast forward to today...I wanted to get back into gaming, but building a new gaming PC was going to be a stretch. So I started looking for a new Blue Iris PC...being in Canada, besides the shitty exchange rate, we don't get the deals you guys in the States do, in terms of the Dell and Lenovo outlet sites, and shipping charges usually negate any savings we do find.
I was originally looking for the cheapest system I could get, either with a 2nd or 3rd gen Core i5. Turned out that anything I could find was either overpriced, 'bottom of the barrel' in terms of quality, or both.
But, I was patient, and kept checking eBay. In the end, I managed to find (and snipe!), for $300 CAD, a refurb desktop with an i5-4570, 16GB of RAM, and it even came with a 1TB HDD, which is now a spare, lol.
Tossed in a spare SSD + my 2TB WD Purple, installed Windows 10, transferred my BI4 license, and it's purring like a kitten!
All 8 cameras are running at 1080p, three of them at 15 fps, and the rest at 10. The i7-2600K used to sit around 30-35% CPU usage...the newer Haswell is more efficient, and the superior Intel HD Graphics has the i5-4570 sitting at 15-20%. Win!!
Special shout out to @fenderman and @bp2008...I searched these forums quite a bit over the past two weeks looking at your hardware recommendations. Posts from the both of you are what steered me to look at Haswell machines, and I only ended up spending slightly more than I wanted to!
Fast forward to today...I wanted to get back into gaming, but building a new gaming PC was going to be a stretch. So I started looking for a new Blue Iris PC...being in Canada, besides the shitty exchange rate, we don't get the deals you guys in the States do, in terms of the Dell and Lenovo outlet sites, and shipping charges usually negate any savings we do find.
I was originally looking for the cheapest system I could get, either with a 2nd or 3rd gen Core i5. Turned out that anything I could find was either overpriced, 'bottom of the barrel' in terms of quality, or both.
But, I was patient, and kept checking eBay. In the end, I managed to find (and snipe!), for $300 CAD, a refurb desktop with an i5-4570, 16GB of RAM, and it even came with a 1TB HDD, which is now a spare, lol.
Tossed in a spare SSD + my 2TB WD Purple, installed Windows 10, transferred my BI4 license, and it's purring like a kitten!
All 8 cameras are running at 1080p, three of them at 15 fps, and the rest at 10. The i7-2600K used to sit around 30-35% CPU usage...the newer Haswell is more efficient, and the superior Intel HD Graphics has the i5-4570 sitting at 15-20%. Win!!
Special shout out to @fenderman and @bp2008...I searched these forums quite a bit over the past two weeks looking at your hardware recommendations. Posts from the both of you are what steered me to look at Haswell machines, and I only ended up spending slightly more than I wanted to!