Hey All,
I am pretty new to this and own a Evolution 8 SCT. I enjoy Planetary Imaging & Livestacking and will begin to attemp EAA. I want to mount a headless Mini PC on OTA (mainly to bypass the Evolutions crappy Wifi) so I am looking for something thats small and light but also capable to run Sharpcap during an imaging session with no hangups. I have found this Beelink AMD Ryzen 7 5700U with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD. I will NOT be using this for post processing - just capture and saving until transfering to a different PC. I am including the link below, any advice (or other suggestions to look at with a $400 budget) would be greatly appreciated!
https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-SER5-570 ... 9hdGY&th=1
Help With Headless Mini PC to Use With Sharpcap
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admin
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Re: Help With Headless Mini PC to Use With Sharpcap
Hi,
I had a play with one of the Beelink mini PCs a few months back - the only real problem with it is the SSD, which slows down dramatically in terms of write speed after you have written about 10% of the capacity in a short period of time. This is almost certainly because the SSD uses QLC technology for capacity, which is slow to write. The drive keeps some space (about 10%) in faster SLC mode, but once you have filled that fast write space up, you start to get dropped frames. Deleting the files you have written into the fast write space and using Windows 'Optimize' on the drive will get you back up to speed, as will waiting (the drive moves the data to slower QLC storage in the background).
This will probably only be a real issue with lunar/solar imaging where you are trying to image at high speed and high resolution at the same time. Planetary is not so bad, as you will probably only be using a relatively small ROI for capture.
Other than the potential SSD issue, the only other thing I noted was that one camera didn't like one of the USB ports on the PC (wouldn't work), but did work properly on other ports. Other things worked OK on that port. The CPU should certainly be fast enough and 16Gb memory will be sufficient.
cheers,
Robin
I had a play with one of the Beelink mini PCs a few months back - the only real problem with it is the SSD, which slows down dramatically in terms of write speed after you have written about 10% of the capacity in a short period of time. This is almost certainly because the SSD uses QLC technology for capacity, which is slow to write. The drive keeps some space (about 10%) in faster SLC mode, but once you have filled that fast write space up, you start to get dropped frames. Deleting the files you have written into the fast write space and using Windows 'Optimize' on the drive will get you back up to speed, as will waiting (the drive moves the data to slower QLC storage in the background).
This will probably only be a real issue with lunar/solar imaging where you are trying to image at high speed and high resolution at the same time. Planetary is not so bad, as you will probably only be using a relatively small ROI for capture.
Other than the potential SSD issue, the only other thing I noted was that one camera didn't like one of the USB ports on the PC (wouldn't work), but did work properly on other ports. Other things worked OK on that port. The CPU should certainly be fast enough and 16Gb memory will be sufficient.
cheers,
Robin
Re: Help With Headless Mini PC to Use With Sharpcap
Thank you Robin! That definitely means I’ll pass on that one. I hope I’m not being a pest just don’t want to make an investment and it wind up not working at all for my main intent. I generally want to use this for planetary imaging and EAA. Since your reply I did some research and looked at the MeLE Quieter 4C (link below). I would purchase this and then buy 1TB of NVMe memory to use in lieu of what it comes with. Would doing that fit the bill? If not do you have any suggestions of a specific make / model mini pc? The Mele seemed appealing as its fanless so no vibration concerns on the scope.admin wrote: ↑Sat Feb 17, 2024 2:14 pm Hi,
I had a play with one of the Beelink mini PCs a few months back - the only real problem with it is the SSD, which slows down dramatically in terms of write speed after you have written about 10% of the capacity in a short period of time. This is almost certainly because the SSD uses QLC technology for capacity, which is slow to write. The drive keeps some space (about 10%) in faster SLC mode, but once you have filled that fast write space up, you start to get dropped frames. Deleting the files you have written into the fast write space and using Windows 'Optimize' on the drive will get you back up to speed, as will waiting (the drive moves the data to slower QLC storage in the background).
This will probably only be a real issue with lunar/solar imaging where you are trying to image at high speed and high resolution at the same time. Planetary is not so bad, as you will probably only be using a relatively small ROI for capture.
Other than the potential SSD issue, the only other thing I noted was that one camera didn't like one of the USB ports on the PC (wouldn't work), but did work properly on other ports. Other things worked OK on that port. The CPU should certainly be fast enough and 16Gb memory will be sufficient.
cheers,
Robin
Mele Mini PC: https://a.co/d/6J5YqvA
Thanks for helping a newbie! BTW your software is amazing! I purchased the Pro license on day 1!
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admin
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Re: Help With Headless Mini PC to Use With Sharpcap
Hi,
the Mele PC has a much lower performance processor, which I think would cause you issues. The AMD 5700U in the original one is much more capable than the Intel N100 (see https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... 0U&id=4156 vs https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... 00&id=5157).
Maybe the Beelink can have its internal storage supplemented or replaced with a higher specification SSD? I should note that most modern SSDs will show some sort of slowdown on writing large amounts due to the same reasons as for the one in the Beelink, but for that particular drive the effect was very large. Unfortunately I don't know what type/model of drive is inside the Beelink, but I suspect it will have been chosen with price in mind rather than performance... Probably worth reading some SSD drive reviews and perhaps looking to see if anyone has documented the internals of the Beelink boxes.
cheers,
Robin
the Mele PC has a much lower performance processor, which I think would cause you issues. The AMD 5700U in the original one is much more capable than the Intel N100 (see https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... 0U&id=4156 vs https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... 00&id=5157).
Maybe the Beelink can have its internal storage supplemented or replaced with a higher specification SSD? I should note that most modern SSDs will show some sort of slowdown on writing large amounts due to the same reasons as for the one in the Beelink, but for that particular drive the effect was very large. Unfortunately I don't know what type/model of drive is inside the Beelink, but I suspect it will have been chosen with price in mind rather than performance... Probably worth reading some SSD drive reviews and perhaps looking to see if anyone has documented the internals of the Beelink boxes.
cheers,
Robin