Mini PC with N100 CPU, good enough for Live stacking & Planetary?

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jake20
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Joined: Thu Dec 08, 2022 2:13 pm

Mini PC with N100 CPU, good enough for Live stacking & Planetary?

#1

Post by jake20 »

Hi,
Do you think the following specs will be good enough performance for doing some EAA/Live stacking and Planetary?

ZWO ASI585MC (Resolution: 8.29Mega Pixel,3840*2160)
Mini PC with the following specs
N100 CPU https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-intel_processor_n100
16GB DDR4 ram (Would faster DDR5 make a big difference?)
M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe SSD 512GB storage
12V Power

thank you!!
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Re: Mini PC with N100 CPU, good enough for Live stacking & Planetary?

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

16Gb will be plenty of ram and I don't think the memory speed DDR4 or 5 will be an issue. That's the easy bit ;)

I think the CPU will be OK - I used to run an AMD A8-5600K as my observing PC until about 3 or 4 years back, and it didn't do too badly. The N100 benchmarks about twice the speed of the A8-5600K, so that sounds promising. I have to admit though that I don't use any PCs at that performance level at the moment, so I can't be sure.

The SSD is one to watch out for if you plan to do high speed imaging (solar/lunar mainly). A lot of SSDs (particularly the cheaper ones used in mini PCs) can only maintain their peak write speed for a certain amount of data - maybe 10% to 15% of total capacity. So, if you plan on capturing a lot of solar videos, the first 50Gb or so will be fine and then might find you get a lot of dropped frames due to the SSD writing much more slowly. Leave the PC for an hour or two and the SSD will re-organise itself and you can write quickly again. It's not the end of the world, but it is something to watch out for. It's less likely to be a problem for planetary as you will likely capture a smaller image size in ROI mode, making smaller videos.

cheers,

Robin
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