How bad will AMD Opteron 2374 HE be for media server/camera recorder?

[Lil'John]

Title states it but for some more clarification.

I got a server chassis that came with a pair of the AMD Opteron 2374 HE processors(4 core each) and 64GB of ram.

Initially, I was going to yank the MB/CPU out and go another route. Now I'm second guessing my thoughts.

The server is going to server up media content(unknown program) as well as record IP camera content using BlueIris.

The media side will feed 2-3 machines at once maximum.

The camera side will have 10 or so Ubiquiti UVC-G3 cameras.

I was going to bare metal VMware the machine with two VMs.

Will I regret using the two Opteron 2374s?

 

[NTMBK]

You might be able to upgrade the CPUs- six-core Opteron 2425 HE are cheap on eBay, and I think should work in a socket F motherboard? But check the spec sheet to be sure. Gives you a ~50% boost in CPU power for not a lot of money, and lets you keep your RAM and motherboard.

 

[cfenton]

I imagine it would be fine as long as it doesn't have to do encoding work from all ten cameras at once or too much transcoding work as a media server. If you do want it to do all of that, I'm not sure eight cores that weak will be able to keep up.

 

[Lil'John]

For the VMware side, I was going to Raid 0 a pair of SSDs.
For the camera side, I was going to Raid 6 either four or six 4TB drives
For the media side, I was going to Raid 6 ten or more 4TB drives.

The Raid will be done through LSI hardware card.

You might be able to upgrade the CPUs- six-core Opteron 2425 HE are cheap on eBay, and I think should work in a socket F motherboard? But check the spec sheet to be sure. Gives you a ~50% boost in CPU power for not a lot of money, and lets you keep your RAM and motherboard.

I'll have to check on the motherboard for support. But at ~$25 each on the six-core, I'm not convinced on the "upgrade".

Blue Iris makes a 'huge' deal out of Intel's Quicksync capability.

I imagine it would be fine as long as it doesn't have to do encoding work from all ten cameras at once or too much transcoding work as a media server. If you do want it to do all of that, I'm not sure eight cores that weak will be able to keep up.

From the cameras side, I'm only planning on recording with motion detected. But I'm hoping to be able to monitor the house especially during winter(I love snow )

From the media server side, I'm not 100% certain what software I'll be using. The consuming devices will mainly be Windows 7/8/10 machines.

Currently, I'm feeding those machines from a Windows 7 machine acting as as a file server with the media being mp3/mp4 file format.

 

[NTMBK]

I'll have to check on the motherboard for support. But at ~$25 each on the six-core, I'm not convinced on the "upgrade".

Huh, weird, that's more expensive than in the UK. On eBay UK you can get a matched pair of them for £18, with free shipping.

 

[hoorah]

I had a bunch of 640x480 cameras recording using iSpy and it used almost nothing. Then I got a 1080P camera and the CPU usage shot up to 40% on my corei5. I don't know much about the camera but I've heard that some are using H.265, so without native 265 support its going to eat a lot of CPU.

I serve media to anywhere between 1 and 6 clients at a time using emby (like plex) and never see any significant cpu usage, however, we're at a point where not many devices need to transcode anymore. Come 4K h.265 content and that will likely change.

I'd use that server you have until 4K content pushes its limits, then re-evaluate.

 

[cfenton]

From the media server side, I'm not 100% certain what software I'll be using. The consuming devices will mainly be Windows 7/8/10 machines.

Currently, I'm feeding those machines from a Windows 7 machine acting as as a file server with the media being mp3/mp4 file format.

The media server software probably won't matter much. As far as I know, none of them have a lot of overhead on their own. I ran Plex from a pathetic Celeron 2957U for a while. The consuming devices and the format of your files will be what matters. If you're serving to other computers and using MP3/h.264 content, you should be fine since anything modern will be able to hardware decode those formats. However, if you're using h.265 files, you'll probably run into trouble since the server will have to software transcode them to h.264 for your older devices.