Hardware odds for an I7 12700F

[synaesthesia]

My office PC is an Acer "Nitro" with i7 1200f and RTX 3060 GPU.

It's an absolute heap of rotten poop. It was purchased by our previous "MSP" apparently required for the CCTV system, a joke in itself but one we're glad to be rid of. However it's a shame to get rid of it.

The problem is lack of ram - it only has 2 slots for DDR4, and the most I can squeeze in it with what we have lying around is 24GB. I need 32 really, but the school doesn't have the budget or means to remortgage under current costs.

In normal circumstances it would be a flash in the pan to buy a new mainboard, but as it's an Acehole I would also need a new case and PSU to suit. Not fussed about the GPU, it sits there doing nothing even with 128 cameras streaming at the same time.

Even though the CPU is a few years old now, there's very little out there in the refurb market. 

Is anyone aware of any refurb sellers that has something that recent in stock and might be happy to supply without CPU? 

 

[ICTDirect_Dave]

I'd say a 12th gen i7 and 3060 is a fairly decent system tbh!

 

I've got some 16GB 25600U (PC4-3200) RAM in stock that I can let you have for £70 per module if that would help?

[synaesthesia]

2 hours ago, ICTDirect_Dave said:

I'd say a 12th gen i7 and 3060 is a fairly decent system tbh!

 

I've got some 16GB 25600U (PC4-3200) RAM in stock that I can let you have for £70 per module if that would help?

Oooh, I might rip your arms off for that. Need to do a bit of thinking, whilst it's a decent system I think the mainboard is an issue. I've put a pair of known good 8gb's in for now to rule out the other modules (I think they were acer branded a-data) 3200s.

Cheers Dave

[ICTDirect_Dave]

No worries.  Just let me know if you need em.

I've only a handful of modules at that price, though.  When they're gone, the next lot will likely be £85.  RAM and SSDs are so volatile right now!

[Fazza]

16 hours ago, synaesthesia said:

apparently required for the CCTV system

 

 

Our CCTV system is nowhere near as fancy as yours and we don't have near as many cameras as you but our CCTV company said the same thing so we too had to buy a similarly spec'd PC (several in fact as everyone 'needs' access to CCTV apparently!  In this case the MSP was just following manufacturer orders/specs.

[synaesthesia]

6 minutes ago, Fazza said:

 

Our CCTV system is nowhere near as fancy as yours and we don't have near as many cameras as you but our CCTV company said the same thing so we too had to buy a similarly spec'd PC (several in fact as everyone 'needs' access to CCTV apparently!  In this case the MSP was just following manufacturer orders/specs.

Wasn't Flywheel/Nexus/Colwyn was it perchance?

Not sure what the manufacturer would have specced, it's just standard hikvision stuff with their horrid NVR and IVMS but even that didn't warrant a dedicated GPU.

Got my RAM in from home at the moment to see if it makes much difference, if it still behaves like a spoiled teenager then the whole thing get's repurposed. I'd say an overpowered doorstop but ebay is a good a purpose as any!

 

[Fazza]

29 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

Wasn't Flywheel/Nexus/Colwyn was it perchance?

Not sure what the manufacturer would have specced, it's just standard hikvision stuff with their horrid NVR and IVMS but even that didn't warrant a dedicated GPU.

Got my RAM in from home at the moment to see if it makes much difference, if it still behaves like a spoiled teenager then the whole thing get's repurposed. I'd say an overpowered doorstop but ebay is a good a purpose as any!

 

 

Hikvision random boxes here too and we spend over £1,000 to meat the manufacturers requirements for the last couple of NVRs we got 🤷‍♂️

[synaesthesia]

Yeah that's the bit I don't get though - all the meaty processing is done by the NVRs so unsure why they specced client PCs to do that  (ours are a pair of DS-96128NI units).

I knock the software a lot because it's ruddy awful, but the hardware and NVRs work well especially for the money.

Made me laugh at a previous school when they fit Avigilon to run the hikvision estate - *thousands* of pounds, a stupidly high specced x86 server (off the shelf Dell) to run it and whilst the software works a mile better, it still wasn't anywhere near as good as dedicated hardware.

[msi_school]

The issue often with modern CCTV is the 4k cameras, it takes a lot of graphical grunt to display 16 4k images on a site manager's desktop, either natively or transcoded.

 

I have set up CCTV Terminal servers in the past with a powerful graphics card and lots of RAM for staff to remote into rather than spending on each users desktop.