I am interested in setting up a dedicated rig for a few IP cameras and a video doorbell (4 1080P total cameras for now) ranging from Amcrest to Wyze. I would be running Win10 64, BI5, HomeAssistant with some dockers for my home automation. Can someone please advise what to purchase for a decent start? I was looking at some Lenovo ThinkCenter M93P's but there are soo many options out there I am having a brain meltdown LOL. I have an OLD (AMD Athlon Phenom II x4 Black) desktop with 8gb DDR3 ram in the corner but HIGHLY doubt it would be sufficient. I have been looking at items on Ebay and would appreciate recommendation please. I am interested in spending ~$250 max if possible. I am disabled and "work" from home so remote view is not really needed but I would like to have a monitor connected with camera displays within my view. Hope this information is enough for some educated guesses as a starting point for me.

-TIA for the help!

A very quick ebay search on M93P's came up with some very promising possibilities under the $200 price point. Any of the newer Intel i series CPUs support Intel QSV which will help in processing and lower your overall CPU usage. This is definitely a world where 'more is better' but the reality of it is, BI wants/needs CPU power so the faster and more cores you can get, the better. The software also gives you lots of room to tweak to help optimize but it can be a little hard to predict without actually doing. That said, having 1080P cameras isn't going to kill you so a 4th gen i7 (or newer) would probably be more than sufficient. Even an i5 would probably be ok but since you're shopping and prices seem low, I'd go i7. In terms of RAM, 8GB is likely more than enough and truthfully 4GB is probably fine but I'd be hard pressed to recommend any system these days with less than 8, regardless of it's use. My current system has 12GB but BI rarely uses more than 1GB.

The biggest consideration may be the amount of storage space. This would boil down to how long you wanted to keep recordings. If a week is fine, you don't need that much... if you want 30/60/90 days, you'll need a lot more. Fortunately BI has a pretty nice system of shipping logs from one storage medium to another so you could easily set up a NAS or have an external hard drive to expand storage.

If you're looking for the TL/DR version of my response, in my opinion you're looking at some pretty good systems for this use case. I wouldn't use the old desktop you have, mostly because of the CPU. For your new system, don't try to penny pinch a few dollars and take a slower CPU. Spend what you're willing to spend and I think you'll be set.

Syc0Maniac wrote: ↑Wed Jul 22, 2020 8:25 pm I am interested in setting up a dedicated rig for a few IP cameras and a video doorbell (4 1080P total cameras for now) ranging from Amcrest to Wyze. I would be running Win10 64, BI5, HomeAssistant with some dockers for my home automation. Can someone please advise what to purchase for a decent start? I was looking at some Lenovo ThinkCenter M93P's but there are soo many options out there I am having a brain meltdown LOL. I have an OLD (AMD Athlon Phenom II x4 Black) desktop with 8gb DDR3 ram in the corner but HIGHLY doubt it would be sufficient. I have been looking at items on Ebay and would appreciate recommendation please. I am interested in spending ~$250 max if possible. I am disabled and "work" from home so remote view is not really needed but I would like to have a monitor connected with camera displays within my view. Hope this information is enough for some educated guesses as a starting point for me.

-TIA for the help!

If you are looking a decent system check on eBay, Computers/Tablets & Networking>Desktops & All-In-Ones>PC Desktops & All-In-Ones, search for i7-4790 or i7-4770 these are decent 4th gen Intel PC's that will handle more that what you need for the price range you mentioned. I have an i7-4790 with 10 Amcrest 1080p cameras, two Amcrest 8MP 4k cameras, and video doorbell. My CPU% is around 34% to 36% recording 24/7.