ZiggyStardust

After doing a lot of research we decided to go with Hikvision for our CCTV security system. It seems like they are one of the major players. We kind of hit a snag with the computers we monitor the cameras on. We can view maybe 6 cameras simultaneously but the CPU usage at that point runs a constant 80% and is very, very taxing on the computer. Is that normal at the 6 camera mark? We were told by their support early on (about 8 months ago) to alleviate this issue by running all the cameras in sub-stream. That solved the issue for 8 months until the other day. I added a camera and everything went to pieces. Half the cameras would not reconnect. Don't know what changed but when I called Hikvision support they determined that the Lorex cameras we started out with couldn't be ran in sub-stream and needed to run them in main-stream. It seemed to work but why, after running fine for 8 months in sub-stream, would the Lorex camera no longer be able to connect when in sub-stream? So we changed the Lorex cameras back to main stream and the CPU usage re-reared its ugly head. I called their support and was told that more memory would drastically improve the situation. I called a second time and was told a Video card would drastically improve the situation. Alas on a third call I was told neither would really help. Well I double the memory from 8 to 16GB and put in a nice little Radeon HD6450 with 1GB and unfortunately my third call in was correct. Neither really helped. I can't much trust Hikvision tech support. Can anyone offer and suggestion? Maybe a third party client for viewing cameras rather then using the Hikvision supplied IVME? Any suggestions?