Nathan Reynolds

Looking for the best NVMe-to-PCIe adapter to add more storage to your PC? I’ve spent the last three months testing 8 different adapters across three builds, including a gaming rig, a video editing workstation, and a home lab server. Some ran blazing fast at full Gen4 speeds. Others throttled within minutes under sustained workloads. A … Read more

When I built my first home server chassis, I hit the same wall most homelab enthusiasts run into: too many fans, too few headers. The motherboard offered three SYS_FAN connectors, but the chassis needed six case fans running 24/7 to keep the drives and CPUs cool. That is when I learned the best fan splitter … Read more

When I built my first homelab three years ago, I made the mistake of pairing a brand-new Ryzen CPU with a budget motherboard that shipped with an outdated BIOS. The board refused to POST, I didn’t have a spare CPU lying around, and my server sat in pieces for a week until I could borrow … Read more

After running fanless mini PCs in my own homelab for the past three years, I can tell you this: nothing beats the silence of a 24/7 server that produces zero mechanical noise. Our team spent 60 days testing eight different fanless mini PCs, measuring idle wattage, Proxmox deployment friction, and thermal throttling under sustained loads … Read more

I built my first Kubernetes home lab with a stack of ageing tower PCs that sounded like a jet engine and pulled more power than my office mini-fridge. Two months later I ripped them out and replaced everything with mini PCs, and the difference was night and day. Quieter, cooler, cheaper to run, and just … Read more

I built my first homelab in a closet with a rackmount server that screamed like a jet engine at 2am. After three landlord complaints and one very unhappy spouse, I tore it all out and replaced it with a stack of mini PCs that barely made a peep. That setup has run 24/7 for over … Read more

I remember the day my mom asked me to find her a computer for email and YouTube. She did not need a thousand-dollar gaming rig. She needed something quiet, simple, and reliable that would not take up half her desk. That search sent me down the mini PC rabbit hole, and I have been testing … Read more

I built my first home lab on a full ATX tower that drank 180W at idle, sounded like a hair dryer, and lived under my desk like an angry space heater. When I finally moved my Proxmox cluster to AMD Ryzen mini PCs, my electric bill dropped by roughly 32 dollars a month, my office … Read more

My team has been running smart home labs for the better part of a decade, and I have personally installed Home Assistant on everything from a Raspberry Pi 4 to refurbished Dell OptiPlex towers. After burning through dozens of setups across our homes and our friends’ homes, I can tell you with confidence that picking … Read more

I lived in a 480-square-foot apartment for three years before I bought my first NAS. The noise from a borrowed full-size unit woke my neighbor through the wall, and the footprint ate half my desk. That experience shaped how I evaluate compact NAS devices for apartments today, and the eight models below are the ones … Read more