On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 06:47:56PM -0800, Marc Shapiro wrote: > Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > >I just wanted to follow up with my final decision for the sake of > >completion. > > > >I finally settled on building my own box (who wouldn't?) using a Via > >Epia SP-13000 mobo with .5G ram and an old 2.2G laptop HD I had lying > >around (no local storage, all video will be saved on a server, so just > >need a boot and basic software, no X). I put it all in a nice little > >iStar S3 Storm Series box. > Out of curiosity -- are you doing any video processing on the new box? > > I plan on playing around with some robotics soon, and am considering > mini-ITX boards like the one you picked. I am hoping to attach a camera > and use openCV to process the video. Can the Epia SP-13000 handle > this. Can any of the mini-ITX boards. Any comments? I'm running a pretty stripped down system on it right now and running two webcams through motion. capturing at 320x240 with a pretty low threshold for detected motion (I need to see motion a good ways away from the camera). AFAICT, motion looks at frames from both cameras and when it detects motion, it starts writing a .avi video of the frames, it is continually processing the incoming frames looking for more motion. I've watched it a bit in top and never seen it move above about 20% cpu using those two cameras. It really depends on how heavy the processing is. The sp-13000 has a via c3 processor running at 1.3ghz. I did some simple math running my two cameras in the same setup on my desktop and successfully predicted the cpu load. running 8% cpu load at x clock cycles on desktop worked out to about 18% cpu load at 1.3 ghz. Came in pretty close. If you can do the same sort of thing that might help you decide... test the setup on a known sufficiently powered but architecturally similar machine, and convert it to the specs of the epia. might get you something you can wrap your head around. I know in the real world this doesn't *really* equate, but it worked for me. Also, there are some more powerful mini-itx's out there. via's got one that clocks closer to 2ghz I think. anyway, I know this wasn't helpful, but there it is. A
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