Well I know you can see my present BI & HA pc in the footer of my posts, but I have just been given a broken pc, and am wondering what to do with it. It wouldn't boot up (the reason it was free), so I slaved in a PSU and all was well. Then it failed, and went into a weird boot loop, where it would spin the fans for a few seconds (different length of time every time) and then stop before any video output occurred. Hmm, search for my mobo BIOS buzzer - OK, one beep, which means POST has passed. What ???

I checked, and it is a Gigabyte motherboard with "Dual BIOS". How to force it to restore it's BIOS from it's own backup ? Hmm, power on/off on the power switch while hammering the pc's on/off button did the trick. Sorted. Then installed latest BIOS, and take a look at what I have.

The pc has a basic mobo, 8GB of RAM, and an Intel i5-3330 cpu. Is that likely to be enough for a few 1080 IP cams with BI5 ? If the cpu can't handle that, then I can feel a Freenas build coming on. Engineer is happy

All opinions are welcome !

It seems quite snappy with Win10, but I'm now installing Freenas on an SSD.

It worked well enough with Freenas too. I've left both OS's on different drives in it, and stored it for a while. The mobo only has 3Gb/s sata, so I think I will keep it as a spare Win10 pc.

Final decision made. The Intel cpu appears to be slower than my existing server cpu - AMD FX-8350 Piledriver, so the Intel pc will remain as a spare Win10 pc.

At an early stage with BI, I tried BI on the FX-8350 pc, as well as on my Ryzen 1800x rig, and the cpu loading was approx 50% lower on the Ryzen. No use going backwards

I am looking at building a new P.C, looking at a ryzen 3950x, Crosshair VIII hero, not sure what ram to use yet but will go way over the top with 64GB, Radeon RX5700 ( never in my life have i had radeon so may change ), not sure what cooler but tempted to try the asus Ryuo 240

Must.... resist....

Urgh