You can put up to four of these cards in a computer

Each card you install in a computer will let you connect 4 cameras to the card.

One card = 4 camera inputs, Two Cards = 8 camera inputs and so on up to 4 cards which would be 16 inputs.

Each card has one video-processing chip that provides 30 frames per second divided by the number of camera inputs on that card. That means that each camera will record at (30 divided 4 = 7.5) 7.5 frames per second. If you have two cards then you have two video processing chips. That’s means that you have an over all recording rate of 60 frames per second. 60 divided 8 cameras inputs are still 7.5 frames per second. So, you don’t lose any frame rate by adding another card unlike other systems being sold on the market. Other cards out there have a plug where you can plug in more camera inputs but they still only have one video processing chip meaning that same 30 frames gets divided by the total number of cameras they have connected. If they had 16 inputs their recording frame rate would be 30 divided by 16 making each cameras recording rate about 1.8 frames per second, which is considered unacceptable.

Example of a card with one chip but lots of inputs: The card on the left has four inputs on the main board and  three input cards that have four inputs each (16 total)
One Chip = 30 frames           30 frames divided by 16 inputs = about 1.8 frames per second per camera input.
You can see that using four 8900 cards (Right) would give you 4 chips = 120 frames divided by 16 = 7.5 frames per camera input.

This is an important factor to our customers so be sure to mention it when talking about the 8900 series DVR cards.
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There are 5 inputs on this card. 4 of them are video inputs. The 5^th port is just a video pass through and we wish it wasn’t even on the card because customers always think this card has 5 camera inputs and it doesn’t.

There are 4 camera inputs and 1 Video Pass through

Note: The video "Pass-Through" only passes through one camera, not all four. It passed through AV1-IN.
It can be made to pass through AV2, 3 or 4 by moving a jumper on the card.

The 8900 series DVR cards recording resolution per camera is 320 x 240, which about this size:

When you stretch a 320 by 240 image to full screen it will be very grainy and distorted.

Our higher end systems like the SKU-16120 and the SKU-16240 are capable of recording at 640 x 480, which is about this size:
As you can see 640 x 480 is much larger the 320 x 240. When stretched to full screen there will not be nearly and much graininess or loss of image resolution. Obviously 640 x480 is 4 times the size of 320 x 240.

The advantage the 8900 DVR cards have is that the are very forgiving about the PC that they are installed in whereas the 16120 and the 16240 DVR cards are very specific about the systems required to make them work.

Just a note: None of our DVR cards will work on a computer with an AMD processor. They all require Intel processors. I don’t know of any DVR that will work with and AMD system. Customers will ask why. I don’t really know the reason why but from my experience if you do get the 8900 cards to work on an AMD computer it is extremely sluggish and performs poorly. AMD systems are great for Gaming and office work but the really stink at processing real video.

The actual reason they will perform poorly on an AMD system is most likely because the software was probably written specifically for Intel with no consideration for AMD systems. This is just a guess but considering all DVR cards don’t work well on AMD systems there may be another reason. Again I’m not sure why.