SharpCap Forums

Hi All,

I am planning a move from controlling my rig from a laptop to controlling a mini-pc on the tripod/ota.

I am curious to hear your thoughts on minimum processor capability. In addition to running NINA, and PHDH2 via EQMOD / native ZWO camera drivers (I run a cooled OSC, guide cam, mount, and EAF,) I would also like to simultaneously SharCap-Pro LikeStacking (including dark and flat corrections.)

Would an i5 be underpowered? Is an i7 overkill? Is 8GB of memory enough, or does it need to be 16GB? Lastly, for SSD - 256GB or 512GB preferred, or can I get away with 128GB.

I know the adage get as much compute power as you can budget for, but I'm trying to get a sense of the minimum involved.

Thanks, and Clear Skies!

--Paul

Hi Paul,

difficult to give clear guidance on this (especially as it will depend a lot on the resolution of the camera you are using- 9 megapixels of data from the ASI533 mono will need a lot less processor/memory resources than 24 megapixels from something like the 2400MC colour camera.

One thing you can try is to test performance on your current laptop - When live stacking, SharpCap shows the amount of time being taken to perform the stacking/rendering/saving of the image in the Live Stack 'Status' tab. If you move to a PC with half the processor speed then those times will likely double... Ideally you want times of no more than a few seconds for stacking and hopefully less than 1s for rendering, but certainly they need to add up to less than the exposure time in use or you will get dropped frames. Rendering times of several seconds will make response to image adjustments in the live stacking controls slow.

You can look up the performance of CPUs relative to each other on CPUBenchmark.net - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php - while SharpCap does use multiple CPU cores, the live stack stacking/rendering time will be most strongly linked to the 'Single Thread Rating' for the CPU.

Memory again depends on resolution, to be honest 16 is probably the best bet. SSD is going to be cramped in 128GB in my opinion, but again, think about the size of your average capture file, how many you will capture in an evening's imaging and how often you can transfer them off the PC and wipe clean.

cheers,

Robin

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense, and I should have mentioned the camera. It is an ASI294MCP and the fits files are ~23MB. I usually take 25-30 darks, flats, and darflats. I'll start connecting to the mini with USB3, but will add wifi or wired network to that. I realize nothing is exact, and I've pretty much concluded that 16GB/512GB is the way to go. Likely either i5 or i7.