WizardHawk

Depends on what you are trying to do with it really, but yes an i7 and 16Gb of ram is pretty solid. We have VMS running on a few machines at a few different properties. One has 5 monitors and displays about 17-20 cameras at one time or so. That unit is only recording 32, but live, playback, and recording all coexist fine with that setup. We use nothing less than a GTX1060 graphics card (or two for more than 4 screens) and the overhead is pretty decent. Graphics cards make a huge difference as the more CUDA cores you have, the more/faster the offload of rendering streams is sent to your card and off of your CPU. The only warning I would give from our experience is they do not yet support GPU/Cuda offloading for rendering HEVC (H.265) so if you are using several of their latest cameras with that codec the overhead on the system climbs sharply. I also do not like how VMS handles fisheye's, but that may be a personal preference. You are limited to just the virtual PTZ mode. It creates 5 entries on your camera list with one being a quad/PTZ and the other 4 being individual views of those full screen. I prefer how both their NVR and Control Center handle them with other options.

Thank you for the prompt replies. We had waited on that backbox for a while due to the weather issues and found out they sent us the entirely wrong unit. We needed a pendant III and got a recessed IV, but were too pressed for time to wait on a return. I pulled the guts out of the IV and put them into a II pendant we had and can report the Spectra III we had for that unit is alive and working normally this afternoon. Had to remove what appears to be a wire guide of some kind from the inside of that II as it prevented the door from closing, but otherwise no issues in the swap. I've read a few of your posts survtech and also found that it is getting harder to justify going to pelco for any out of warranty work. We sent back two Spectra II's to pelco a few months back and they told us over $1,300 each for repair! Well of course you would have to be crazy to pay that much for a repair so we took them back. Found a service contact in WI that fixed them both for under $300 each. One of these days I'll work up the nerve to crack open one myself and try fixing things like rings etc (things you know what part is bad without test equipment) in house. I have browsed the site you always point people to and will for sure check them out next time we have a backbox issue or want to dabble in camera repair. We replaced this last backbox because we had two cameras fry while hooked up to it. Both were III's and died from apparent over heating even though both had good working fans on them. Tested the power to the units and it was 23.8 volts at both ends so we figured it had to be something with the power supply on the backbox unit. New unit is working far cooler than the one we pulled, but then it has that environmental blower on it. Not sure how much cooler that keeps the cameras.

I know this may be deemed too entry level of a question, but I've searched for the answers everywhere and found nothing explicit. We have several Pelco PTZ's in our building. Some are older II's and a few III's. We have a mix of backboxes because of this. We already know you can put a Spectra III into a II backbox (yes, not recommended due to how the camera lines up with air path but it will work). You cannot run a II in a III backbox because that would leave no fan. We ordered a III backbox to replace one we suspected was having problems and got a IV by mistake. Does anyone know if you can run a Spectra III in a IV backbox? I know it snaps in, but are there any issues with this setup? Any feedback on this would be much appreciated.