DIY blue iris & deepstack

kfinch · November 28, 2021

Not sure if this is the right thread but I'm looking to slap together a PC to use for home camera system. been looking into Blue iris and I know I need at least a 6th gen I7?

is there any real advantage to using a beefier system than some old dell/hp desktop running 6th gen chips? what is the bottleneck on a system running 24/7 video? (currently looking at 8 cameras, at least four exterior and four interior,

also does anyone know if any of the older desktop refurbs can be swapped into cases with better expandability or are they pretty much stuck as configured?

unless there's a reasonable way to use a laptop I will need to acquire a system, I don't plan on going the cheapest option available but I also don't want to go overkill.

I would love to have a remote data backup (nas?) in case of system failure/vandalism.

jec6613 · December 1, 2021

For business desktops, they're basically 100% proprietary cases. They do come in mid-tower though, so can expand quite well, and parts are readily available for them.

I use a Haswell Xeon E3 based 1U system and a K2200 GPU to handle all encoding, decoding, and deepstack on the GPU itself, for 14 cameras and has room to expand to 20 or so. Especially using Deepstack on a GPU and camera sub-streams, you can probably go older than 6th gen and keep it working well, but I'd suggest actually going the other way to 8th gen to support Windows 11. Windows 10 has a ticking clock of 5 more years of support, and getting an 8th gen CPU will get you 10-15 years of OS supports.

One thing to think about is to be 100% sure your network is up to it. With all of the streams coming in, I'm well over 500 Mbps constantly going to this server, so I use two LACP'd GbE NICs to handle the bandwidth, and the switch it goes into has a 20 GbE link to my upstream core switch (a 24 port fiber model).