Hello!
I am ordering a new Astro PC and would like to use it for live stacking in the future, using the Lucky Imaging method for recordings with exposure times of up to 1 second and less. I will probably use my new QHY678C and M cameras for this.
What is important with an Astro PC and Sharpcap in order to achieve this without too many dropped frames?
I would get an HP Elitedesk Mini PC G9 Intel i5 12500 with 32GB DDR5 RAMS and faster m2 SSD. Would that be enough for live stacking?
What hardware requirements are necessary for live stacking
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artofpix_astro
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Re: What hardware requirements are necessary for live stacking
Hi,
yes, that spec of PC should work fine for the cameras you are suggesting (6 megapixel) for live stacking. 32Gb of ram will be plenty, and an i5 CPU is a good choice.
If you also plan to try high speed imaging (solar/lunar/planetary), be careful in your choice of SSD. At the cheaper end of the SSD market, the super-fast advertised write speed is only typically good for writing about 10% of the SSD capacity. After that, you need to leave it running for some time while it shuffles the newly written data to a slower part of the SSD before you can get more writing done at the maximum speed. Have seen this come up a number of times now on mini-pc SSDs. If you are going to capture a few 10s of Gb of data for lunar/planetary/solar from time to time then no problem, but if you want to capture 100s of Gb in one session then worth thinking about.
cheers,
Robin
yes, that spec of PC should work fine for the cameras you are suggesting (6 megapixel) for live stacking. 32Gb of ram will be plenty, and an i5 CPU is a good choice.
If you also plan to try high speed imaging (solar/lunar/planetary), be careful in your choice of SSD. At the cheaper end of the SSD market, the super-fast advertised write speed is only typically good for writing about 10% of the SSD capacity. After that, you need to leave it running for some time while it shuffles the newly written data to a slower part of the SSD before you can get more writing done at the maximum speed. Have seen this come up a number of times now on mini-pc SSDs. If you are going to capture a few 10s of Gb of data for lunar/planetary/solar from time to time then no problem, but if you want to capture 100s of Gb in one session then worth thinking about.
cheers,
Robin
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artofpix_astro
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Re: What hardware requirements are necessary for live stacking
Thanks very much! That makes my choice easier 
I would have this spoke here at home, I would have installed it:
Crucial P3 2TB M.2 PCIe Gen3 NVMe Internal SSD, Up to 3500MB/s - CT2000P3SSD8
It costs about €90 as a 2TB variant - so it is probably one of the cheaper SSDs.
I would have this spoke here at home, I would have installed it:
Crucial P3 2TB M.2 PCIe Gen3 NVMe Internal SSD, Up to 3500MB/s - CT2000P3SSD8
It costs about €90 as a 2TB variant - so it is probably one of the cheaper SSDs.
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admin
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Re: What hardware requirements are necessary for live stacking
Hi,
yes, you are right - this is a QLC (four bits per cell) drive. According to the review here - https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cr ... d-review/2 - it can use all free space as high speed cache, which is better than many. You will be able to write data up to 1/4 of the free space reported by Windows at high speed and then it will slow down dramatically until it has managed to move that data into QLC storage.
cheers,
Robin
yes, you are right - this is a QLC (four bits per cell) drive. According to the review here - https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cr ... d-review/2 - it can use all free space as high speed cache, which is better than many. You will be able to write data up to 1/4 of the free space reported by Windows at high speed and then it will slow down dramatically until it has managed to move that data into QLC storage.
cheers,
Robin