Dixit

Man someone owes me for tearing this thing apart. As I suspected, this isn't your ordinary heat sink spring clip, Im familiar with those, built many computers in my day. Ended up having to basically unplug everything off the board, unscrew the board, and from the bottom you can see these are basically one time use clips for the holes through the motherboard. So ended up having to use needle nose pliers to carefully squeeze them inwards to pop them through the hole. The heat sink finally came off and cleaned up the TIM which was unusually hard, then took the picture below. Its a TI chip. Here is the spring clip which you can see is only meant for one time use.

Doesn't seem that easy to pop the fan off. Almost seems like its screwed in from the bottom of the the board. Those release pins didn't release the fan off the CPU.

I just received mine as well. Ordered the Swann off Costco and the 4 extra cameras bringing it to 8 cameras, cost me close to what almost $1700. Opened it up and noticed the back panel of the NVR wasn't fully seated at the bottom. Im OCD so it was annoying me and decided since there is no warranty label on the NVR I might as well open it. Before I did open it I noticed in another box was the power cable, remote, network cable, and a SATA cable. Im like whats this for? So I was intrigued. So I opened the NVR to fix the back plate to be seated properly and to my surprise there is another spot for a 2nd HDD for expansion as well as that is what the 2nd SATA cable is for. Its already prewired for power just need to mount the 2nd HDD and put the 2nd SATA cable in there. I took some pictures of the inside for anyone else who is curious about the internals. It definitely is not loud at all, I have a dB meter for my Home Theater system and I could put that upto it and take some pictures/videos to prove its not loud. Need to do some more testing on this. I initially tried to hookup the camera to the NVR using a standard network cable I had sitting (like a 6ft) and the camera didn't power up or connect, it only worked when I used the 60ft network cable supplied. I hope this isn't some proprietary cable or some sort, I bought a 1000ft bulk cable of Cat5e, I was intending on running it myself around the house and fishing it through the attic, etc and just crimp on the RJ45 jacks. Maybe its just a different pinout they use instead of standard 568A/568B cable. But again need to do some more testing on that. Ive only played with it for about 30mins so far. Here is the pictures of the internals and closeups of the HDD, Power Supply, Main board itself, SATA port.

Still not bad to me. Im really thinking of just pulling the trigger on this and the extra cameras (even though those alone will be $700 for 4 more cameras) and then seeing how it goes with full 8 going. Dixit

Ive been searching all over this stuff and mainly interested in high resolution system like a 1080p system. Initially what caught my eye was that Swann 1080p DVR system they released a few months ago but not seeing it in an 8camera setup. Then I see Swann doing IP based 1080p cameras with an NVR. I see Q-See ones as well but just confused. This is for my house to replace the old system the previous owner took with them. So there will be 4 outside and 4 inside. Id like to get 1080p and the best framerate, not looking for ones that drop in the 5-7.5fps range. I see the thread for the Swann one from Costco but have seen the real info on it and if that is the better deal. I have the ability to re-run the wires (since I will technically have to, they left the old analog wires) since they are all through a full access Attic. IP would be good since I could run a single Cat5 and use PoE. Thanks Dixit

Looked into these Aver cards, the NV6240T, seems like a pretty powerful card that it can do 8 IP cameras with 80MP total. So with this card it would take a lot of load off the CPU since it seems its doing it all via hardware encoding at the card level and CPU would be just decoding side if you viewing it live on the computer (which for me probably wont happen as the computer if I go this route would be tucked away somewhere with no monitor hooked to it after its configured). Cant seem to find any detail on what the cpu/hardware requirements are for this or if it can be a very low end machine like sort of how you have just an i3 540 on a 16channel setup. EXR6004 Mini this seemed nice too except its only a 4camera one. Guess then we looking at 8 decent IP cameras that wont rip me a new one. At 200-300 a pop we at what $2400 on the high side, then the card at $390, then the cpu, so probably looking around 3000-3500 I guess. Then I guess we also need a 8port PoE hub and wiring which I can handle and take care of. That is a tad higher than I expected but if that means a nicer system I guess it is what it is. Really the camera cost is what is killing it I guess. Dixit

Yea that's what I was thinking, I could build a solid computer and then buy 8 decent IP cams, which are what around $250-300 a pop. Then leaves me around $1k for computer costs which is decent amount. Although staying lower like in the 1500 range is better, $3k+ is sort of overkill in my head for an 8cam home system. Dixit

$3500 is a bit higher than the other ones. But if its that much better then I guess that's the price one will have to pay for that. Dixit

Forgot to address your first part, yea we are all waiting to see what these two mainstream systems are capable of doing. That sample video that Chan exported seemed pretty decent. Just not sure if it can handle 8 at once. Right now that Swann is basically a 4 camera 8camera NVR. But you cant buy the other 4 cameras right now. I haven't looked into the Q-See ones, all I saw was the ones sold by Costco/Sams were only 720p version. Dixit

Well building out a machine is no problem, Im an expert there. I have actually this i7 2600 with 8gig running Windows 2012 server that I use now as just my home server so most of the time it is idling doing nothing. Could easily use that. When I had businesses we had the Geovision stuff back in the day, but not sure what they do now or how good they are, I personally didn't like their interface and quality (granted it was almost 9yrs ago). If we used my existing i7 2600 box, how much load or cpu utilization we talking about for 8 cameras running full tilt at 1080p and best frame rate? If we go that route what cameras can I do that are reasonable price wise? Ive seen a few but they all are 300-400 per camera putting me at $3200 just the cameras. Dixit

I cant say for sure, Was the NVR recording all 4 at the same time this clip was taken? If so I guess we can say that. Id really like to know myself (since Im really interested in putting this one at my house) if it can truly handle 8 cameras at 1080p and still have a high framerate. Dixit

Looking at the video the car and the bird flying by seems to be at least 15fps, clarity looks pretty good to me. And you said these were through a window pane right? Dixit

Here is the codec detailed info, shows variable for frame rate. Clip1 General Complete name : Clip1try2.mp4 Format : MPEG-PS File size : 4.84 MiB Duration : 13s 151ms Overall bit rate : 3 090 Kbps Video ID : 224 (0xE0) Format : AVC Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec Format profile : Main@L4.1 Format settings, CABAC : Yes Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames Duration : 13s 151ms Bit rate : 3 028 Kbps Width : 1 920 pixels Height : 1 080 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate mode : Variable Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Stream size : 4.75 MiB (98%) Color primaries : BT.709 Transfer characteristics : BT.709 Matrix coefficients : BT.709 Clip2 General Complete name : Clip2try2.mp4 Format : MPEG-PS File size : 9.22 MiB Duration : 25s 527ms Overall bit rate : 3 030 Kbps Video ID : 224 (0xE0) Format : AVC Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec Format profile : Main@L4.1 Format settings, CABAC : Yes Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames Duration : 25s 527ms Bit rate : 2 970 Kbps Width : 1 920 pixels Height : 1 080 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate mode : Variable Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Stream size : 9.04 MiB (98%) Color primaries : BT.709 Transfer characteristics : BT.709 Matrix coefficients : BT.709