What hardware should I be looking at for 24 3MP cameras recording 24/7?

[PancakeBimmer]

Current system specs are as follows:

• Intel I7-4770
• 8GB of RAM
• 4TB HDD

As of now the system is recording video 24/7 from 16 3MP cameras (2048x1536@20FPS) and 3 1.3MP (1280x1024@30FPS) on 4TB harddrive and just over-writes the footage. There is no motion detection going on whatsoever, and footage is written directly to disk. Current CPU load is around 40-60% and only 3-4GB of ram is being used.

I want to replace 1.3MP cameras with same 3MP cameras and add about 6-7 more 3MP cameras. I don't think the current system will handle that much more pixel without CPU utilization creeping to 100% so an upgrade is needed.
Could I get away with something like dual socket E5-2670 (v1 or v2) or should I stick with latest consumer i7?

 

[fenderman]

Current system specs are as follows:

• Intel I7-4770
• 8GB of RAM
• 4TB HDD

As of now the system is recording video 24/7 from 16 3MP cameras (2048x1536@20FPS) and 3 1.3MP (1280x1024@30FPS) on 4TB harddrive and just over-writes the footage. There is no motion detection going on whatsoever, and footage is written directly to disk. Current CPU load is around 40-60% and only 3-4GB of ram is being used.

I want to replace 1.3MP cameras with same 3MP cameras and add about 6-7 more 3MP cameras. I don't think the current system will handle that much more pixel without CPU utilization creeping to 100% so an upgrade is needed.
Could I get away with something like dual socket E5-2670 (v1 or v2) or should I stick with latest consumer i7?

Have you enabled hardware acceleration? You dont want that xeon as it does not support intel hd...add more memory...it will make a difference despite BI appearing to only use a bit.
https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/6201-Blue-iris-and-CPU-consumption-as-it-relates-to-memory-usage
You will find that the 3mp camera will perform much worse in low light/night vision than the 1.3mp cams..
You should also lower the frame rates, no reason for 30fps, 15 is way more than enough...you can also lower the live preview rate in blue iris...

 

[Ryan00]

Have you enabled hardware acceleration? You dont want that xeon as it does not support intel hd...add more memory...it will make a difference despite BI appearing to only use a bit.
https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/6201-Blue-iris-and-CPU-consumption-as-it-relates-to-memory-usage
You will find that the 3mp camera will perform much worse in low light/night vision than the 1.3mp cams..
You should also lower the frame rates, no reason for 30fps, 15 is way more than enough...you can also lower the live preview rate in blue iris...

Why would the 1.3 cameras be better in low light then the 3mp? Also what cams you thinking of buying amcrest?

 

[fenderman]

Why would the 1.3 cameras be better in low light then the 3mp? Also what cams you thinking of buying amcrest?

https://www.cnet.com/news/htc-explains-why-4-megapixels-are-better-than-8/
If the image sensor size is the same, then the above is generally applicable...Dont buy amcrest, they are simply overpriced rebranded dahua.

 

[bp2008]

An i7-4770 is close to as good as it gets for a Blue Iris CPU. You should be able to free up enough resources by doing as fenderman suggested. Enable hardware accelerated decoding, 15 FPS max per camera, and reduce the live preview rate in BI (this is even more important if your monitor is larger than 1920x1080).

Using hardware acceleration on an i7 CPU is probably going to be better for BI than a dual socket Xeon system even if the Xeon system benchmarks a lot higher. And that is before even considering the power consumption difference.

 

[PancakeBimmer]

I completely forgot about the hardware acceleration support. First time I tried it it was crashing my BlueIris, but that has been quite few months ago (I think).
Definitely going to turn it on now and see how it work-out.

What would be a recommended bitrate for 3MP cameras at 15FPS? Right now it is 2Mbits per second.

 

[bp2008]

There is no hard-set rule, but 2 Mbps is quite low. I'm running my 3MP cameras mostly at 2 megapixel resolution (1920x1080) and 10 FPS with 6 Mbps bit rate. Lower frame rates can help regain some quality lost by a low bit rate, but you'd have to set it really, really low to make 2 Mbps produce as good of quality as these cameras are capable of.