Intellex Extreme?

[LevonP]

For the last few months, we were experimenting with newer hardware and ability to boost Intellex performance higher than the standard equipment shipped by American Dynamics. All our tests are restricted to only Intellex DVMS series and does not involve to Intellex Ultra platform.

The idea is to drastically increase overall functionality of such high end system at least 50% and have capability to compete with its counterparts from other manufacturers such as Bosch, Nice and few others. There are no considerations on hardware costs at this time, rather pure performance increase compared to basic system available from American Dynamics.

Hard drive costs are dropping daily, so storage is not and never will be cost bottleneck, thus internal storage of such system can easy reach at least 4TB minimum.

If we can increase performance of Windows and Intellex combined and prove that it can and will perform better than what may be avail from American Dynamics, then obviously we can have yet another different platform for high end customers, who can and are willing to pay the top dollar for these type of performing systems.

Here are some of our finding to date...

First off, we had to create a baseline system - exact same system that anyone can purchase directly from American Dynamics. Then we started clocking the following processes as follows:

a. Boot time from start to finish

b. How long it took to exit Intellex to Windows Desktop

c. How long it took to shot down Intellex

d. How fast we were able to search for video clips

e. How fast we were able to burn CDs or DVDs

f. What was the Intel processor performance during record mode

g. What was the Intel processor performance during the playback mode

h. How many processes were running during above tasks and how much clock cycle were being used for each process

i. Same above tasks with similar system that comes from American Dynamics with Intel Dual Core processor, considering the fact that majority of the system are based on an Intel single core processor.

j. and few others...

Now, considering the base line information, then we started digging into areas that were easy to change and compare with above data and here are our preliminary information as follows:

1. By dropping higher speed and RAM capacity video cards even operating on PCI Express 16 mode does not anyway constitute any advantage or performance or improvement of the video quality of the Intellex. This is true on any chipset being used, regardless if the manufacturer is ATI or NVIDIA. - Our best results amounted to no more than 3% overall and negligible increase compare to the baseline system.

2. Increasing the RAM capacity to 1GB helps (standard systems are shipped with 256MB and lately 512MB for Intellex 4.x platform)... but does not improve the overall performance of the Intellex. We increased the RAM to 2GB and even 4GB and with no tangible increase or performance boost that were noticeable. Our best case scenario was no more than 3% increase at best.

3. Testing with Intel Dual Core processors - at average, but not significant increase of 4% were observed just by taking Intellex from Intel single core to dual core - again, none significant increase, but still a minor improvement.

4. Hard drives - We changed Wester Digital 7,200 RPM drives with WD Raptor 10,000 RPM SATA drives. Performance was increased solid 14% by changing such hard drives and did constitute probably the largest increase of performance yet. The cost of such hard drive or the maximum size available for such technology was not under any consideration even though these type of hard drive maximum capacity is capped at 150GB. Regardless, there was a significant increase in performance of the Intellex based on this technology.

We are in process to test Intellex system with SAS technology drives from Seagate running at 15,000 RPM and with SAS controllers either from Promise Technology or Adaptec. We should have this hardware soon and will post the results of this new test when available.

The future tests can include AMD processor solutions with dual core or even quad core processors and AMD's Spider Platform , so stay tuned for more results as we make them available. Also, we will test the same with Intel's quad core processors to compare the results with AMD solutions...

Thanks,

[LevonP]

Well, we finally received the majority of the parts from Seagate and from Promise Technology.. just missing SAS cable, but that should be here latest by Friday this week...

Once we have all these parts, then the tests could start... :xd:

[LevonP]

Some preliminary results are outstanding by using SAS technology controller from Adaptec and drives from Seagate...

Here are some of technical results that are crucial as an evidence to substantiate our findings as follows:

http://cctvhelp.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=385&stc=1&d=1207933034

By looking at this chart and comparing the SAS controller/hard driver results with Western Digital Raptor drive (with 10,000 RPM), ATA drives, SATA drives and even SCSI Ultra 320, this new combination of technology basically destroys any known I/O burst speeds that we ever encountered...

With this information on hand, then we had Intellex system crunching numbers for few days. Of course, since the SAS drive capacity was no more than 150GB, we had to utilize SATA drives in Stripe mode (we used two 500GB Surveillance grade Seagate drives) to accommodate 1TB storage. Also, we raised all the setting in the Intellex to its maximum capacity, i.e. 30IPS per camera, the highest resolution possible, etc...

We observed some very drastic performance improvement when utilizing this technology in the Intellex environment, extremely fast playback and review, much faster search capabilities, etc., however...

It did not improve any of its picture quality specially in the playback mode nor helped any in the "zoom" function to show better video without much pixelation that pre-exists with all the Intellex systems.

With all the tests that were performed by using best motherboards and with fastest processors (we used AMD and Intel dual and quad core processors), increase in RAM to 4GB, used NVIDIA Ultra dual output video card with 768MB on-board RAM and even the fastest hard drives and controller in the planet, the picture quality basically remained the same or was improved marginally.

Bottom line - the bottleneck of the video quality of the Intellex resides with the capture card! Unless this proprietary compression based solution changes its design, nothing could be done to improve the video quality of the Intellex systems. This includes tests that were conducted in both Intellex version 3.2 and version 4.x systems.