New to forum but have been searching and reading a bit.

Building a new house, will purchase BI to handle POE cameras, have read much on ipcamtalk about which cameras, general strategies, etc. Starlight 2MP seem hard to beat, at least to start.

Anyway, I have an equipment closet that is being wired with all house coax, network for data, POE runs to cameras, echo devices, all security wiring, Lutron main repeater, etc. and will house unRaid server, home automation server, BI server etc.

I plan to install a rack and use rack mounted switches, patch panels, servers and other hardware as much as possible to keep things organized and space efficient.

I've read here about the fallacy of picking up used R310 or R410 or whatever poweredge servers due to extra cost of operation (electricity) year after year. That makes sense. On the other hand, when I start looking at what it takes to put a more modern reasonable TDP processor in a rackmount case the build price seems to pile up rather quickly. Maybe that's because I'm looking at 1U options? In any case, server motherboards that fit these rackmount cases are very pricey, so even if CPU and RAM etc aren't too bad, the total price is quite high.

What suggestions do you guys have for a reasonable (as low as possible) cost system that is rack mountable (1U or 2U preferably), low TDP/power consumption, with enough power to handle BI servicing 6-8 cameras? This box would be dedicated to BI, not planning on doing a VM deal or sharing hardware resources with anything else. I've even wondered about buying one of those old poweredge servers just for the chassis and power supply as that is still cheaper than most new options I see for just a chassis.

Did you end up getting an answer to your question? I'm also looking at a possible server solution and tgere are some really good deals on eBay ATM but need to know if the cpu will hold up. NAS Server 1RU – HP ProLiant DL320e Gen8 – E3-1230v2

I have a lot of (work) history with HP ProLiant servers so thats where I went for mine. I also got a good deal on eBay though for an older server, a DL180 G6. It came loaded except for hard drives.... I liked this option, specifically the 180, because it's made for 3.5" drives of which I had about 12x 1TB drives sitting around. It could hold all of them and I just had to purchase enough to fill out the bays. The advantage of buying these used rack servers that previously were used in a datacenter is that, while they have years on them of continuous use, in theory they were run in a clean, climate controlled datacenter. And because businesses lifecycle based on age and budget (not necessarily hardware failure) there is an abundance of spare parts online for cheap.

So the DL320e Gen8..... from the best I can tell, the mobo only supports a single CPU socket which limits you a lot. Yes the specific server is likely to handle your load just fine - but why not future proof if you're talking a few bucks here or there. My server is dual socket and I just upgraded to dual 6-core (from dual 4-core) processors for $20. You may also want to consider the drive storage unless you plan on using a NAS or something. I believe the 320 is capable of 4 drives and in my experience, while performance may be better, the 2.5" drives are more expensive - and if you're doing RAID, your performance is going to be fine anyway.

If you do end up going with a ProLiant, I have plenty of spare iLO Advanced license keys in my drawer if you'd like one. They don't actually register or anything so as long as it's a valid key, it works. The benefit is it will give you the ability to launch a remote console which can come in REALLY handy.

Yep, I have a solution that gives great performance and is still really cheap.

Take two 1x3s and bolt them into your rack with a piece of plywood between them and plop a desktop server in there on its side.

$700 or $800 tops including the wood will get you a pretty darn good machine for BI.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_c ... 18l_v3-491

the compare above is for the V3 Xenon E3 and that MoBo only supports the V2 Xenon E3 so the real compare would be worse than shown.

And the Xenon doesn't even support QuickSync.

Darn, I'm starting to sound like crazy man

Robpoy86 wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 1:53 pm Did you end up getting an answer to your question? I'm also looking at a possible server solution and tgere are some really good deals on eBay ATM but need to know if the cpu will hold up. NAS Server 1RU – HP ProLiant DL320e Gen8 – E3-1230v2

Also, for choosing CPUs (if you get any selection from your eBay merchant), you might want to try and cross reference this Intel filter. This should show all Xeon processors capable of Intel QSV: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... Family=595

Thanks for the input. Looking at this again is something like this better. HP DL380 GEN 5 server running the following:

Two Intel Xeon quad core CPUs @ 3.0ghz
16GB ECC RAM
2x 74gb SAS drives running raid 1
Network card
Single power supply (can be upgraded with a second one)

I'm unsure how to compare cpu's due to lack of experiance with hardware

Just a copy and paste from my previous thread on this, this is my current setup:

i3-9100 with 8GB of RAM can run 7 x 4MP and 2 x 2MP cameras @10FPS, 7 day retention no issue, currently using direct to disk (with my W10 PC as the time server so all the cameras are in sync without internet access) and getting around 4GB total RAM usage and 25% CPU utilization, the onboard GPU is barely at 20% utilization either so no point in buying a secondary GPU I don't think.

My total build come to just over £400:
[*] 4U Codegen ATX rackmount case (plenty of room for expansion!)
[*] 256GB of Sandisk SSD storage
[*] 2TB WD Purple
[*] Intel i3-9100
[*] Gigabyte H310M motherboard
[*] 8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM
[*] Asus DVD-RW drive
[*] 1 x 120mm fan, 2 x 80mm fan, cables etc.

I run this in a 15U cabinet containing router, modem, switch, patch panel and a UPS eventually.

I used a 4U case just because of the amount of HDDs I plan to have (home server) and for expansion but really I don't see why the above wouldn't fit in a 1U (maybe) or definitely a 2U ATX rackmount case, you might just have to buy a low profile PSU rather than an ATX PSU?