I’m looking at some CWWK, topton, and oaknode boards online for an upcoming build. I’m throwing proxmox and OPNsense on this. There’s a ryzen 8845HS board I’m curious about but there’s also some intel boards I could drop an i5-14600T used CPU into that could work well too. Either way I would have an intel ARC GPU in the PCI slot for media decode/encode and a coral TPU in the E-key M2 slot for frigate object recognition.
But I get conflicting info online about these boards being a waste of time and money. I see things about them burning out, or having weird BIOS bugs that never get fixed. On the other hand, NAScompares seems to like these boards. Are these something I should avoid?
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I don’t know that anyone has collected any sort of data on reliability. I have a CWWK board that’s been working well for about a year now.
One year is not a reliable data point. Going 5 years would be better.
A cheap N100 or N305 mitx with more ethernet and sata ports already attached is one thing, but I wouldn’t wanna risk warranty hell with more money on the line.
Considering you are gonna add a dgpu I would look at a low tdp desktop cpu such as ryzen 7600/9600 from a trusted store instead.
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/topton-warranty-practices.40421/I want zenarmor and suricata. Intel N series chips cannot handle that. The dGPU is just needed for handling media decode and encode, not actual rendering.
The quicksync built-in to the n100 PR n305 is more than adequate to encode/decode media. If that’s all you’re using it for, you don’t need an Intel arc.
Incorrect. The built in quicksync is adequate for a limited number of simultaneous streams. Considering I plan for frigate to handle multiple cameras on this machine I will need more streams.
You are mistaken. Frigate ingests rtsp and direct streams using HLS, which only accepts h264 or h265. The vast majority of cameras encode in h264. H264 is a trivial decode operation on modern hardware within the last decade.
I am currently looking at CPU usage in my frigate container with 5 1080p RTSP streams and it is hovering at between 4% and 8%. Without any quicksync configured, just CPU and coral.
I don’t know what your deal is, or why you think you know more than folks who have been doing this for years, but stop, please. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
They used to encode with h264. I set up a rig 2 years ago with the goal for using that but just couldn’t source cameras at a decent price that use the olde codec. It’s actually pretty difficult to find that anymore. Also, they need to decode streams for processing for things like object detection. That doesn’t work without decoding being done on each stream first.
I am open to being wrong on this I just want to be certain before I get to the spending money stage. Can you show me where you got that information?
I checked the specs on 5 modern, newly released IP cameras. They all use h264/h265, aka AVC1 and HVEC. Not surprising, cause that’s part of the spec.
I’m angrily going to go look because you’ve introduced doubt in my mind. And I don’t like not knowing.
The Arc actually makes sense here since OP mentioned multiple cameras for Frigate - QuickSync on N100/N305 starts to choke with 5+ simultaneous streams, while Arc A380 can handle 8+ streams with AV1 decode/encode as a bonus.
I have 5x1080 streams to my frigate container and it only has a coral tpu passed through, 4 to 8% CPU usage in the container. The arc will not yield any advantage unless op is using vino to run the ml, but they pointed out that they are getting a coral tpu.
With a N100 or N305?
N100, 16gb ddr4, m.2 ssd
Cool, I have a similar setup and was looking to upgrade to support Frigate and several other things in addition to the couple dozen Docker containers already running. It’s nice to hear that won’t be required.
I never recommended the Intel N chips though. :)
I have Zenarmor and Suricarta running on my Topton N100 and it works fine. But the machine only has OPNsense on it.
ODROID might be an option
https://www.odroid.nl/Odroid-H4-Plus
They’re from South Korea, so likely better quality than cwwk
That is an interesting option but I’m not sure 4 gracemont cores could do full IPS in opnsense.
There’s a 8 core version, but yea isn’t ideal of all situations
Check out https://www.servethehome.com/. I imagine you’ll find some useful info there.
How long is the warranty? If the warranty is through the company, how long is the company going to be around?
To be fair, how much longer is Intel going to be around?
A couple decades at least, if things go extremely poorly for them and keep on doing that.
IPMI and ECC are not on your wishlist, correct?
Correct. I actually would prefer not to have ipmi
