Nathan Reynolds

I built my first AI workstation three years ago with a cheap SATA SSD, and it nearly broke me. Every time I loaded a 70B parameter model, I sat there watching the progress bar crawl. The fix was a proper NVMe SSD, and the difference was instant. After testing 8 of the best NVMe SSDs … Read more

Building a home server on a budget used to mean accepting slow SATA speeds or risking spinning HDDs. After testing 10 different drives across Proxmox, TrueNAS, and Unraid setups in my home lab, I can tell you the best budget NVMe SSDs for home servers in deliver real performance without enterprise pricing. This guide covers … Read more

When I set up my first dual-monitor home office, I expected to need a bulky tower to drive two displays without lag. I was wrong. After three months of testing compact desktops in my home workspace, the right mini PC handled my 4K plus 1440p setup, my spreadsheet-heavy workload, and dozens of browser tabs without … Read more

Running large language models on a tiny box that fits in your hand used to be a fantasy. With AMD’s Ryzen AI processors packing dedicated NPUs, I now run 70B parameter models quietly on machines smaller than a paperback book. After three months benchmarking eight contenders in my home office, the best Ryzen AI mini … Read more

I built my first home office around a full-size tower PC, and it ate half my desk. That frustration is exactly why I started testing ultra-compact mini PCs for small desks — computers small enough to hide behind a monitor, light enough to Velcro to the underside of a shelf, and quiet enough that I … Read more

Running a Windows Server from your home office used to mean a clunky tower humming in the closet, drawing 200 watts of power, and generating enough heat to keep the room warm. In , the best mini PCs for running Windows Server at home flip that script completely. A modern mini PC home server sips … Read more

After spending three months running Proxmox clusters on thirty different mini PCs in our home lab, I can tell you this: the best mini PC for a Proxmox cluster node isn’t the one with the flashiest specs. It’s the one that idles below 15W, has the RAM ceiling you actually need, and won’t drop network … Read more

I switched my home ISP router to a mini PC firewall running OPNsense two years ago, and I have not looked back. The leap in control, visibility, and speed made me realize how much power consumer routers leave on the table. If you are hunting for the best mini PCs for a home firewall and … Read more

If you’ve ever lost a render to a dying drive or watched a 4K timeline stutter while three editors waited on you, you already know why picking the right NAS matters. After spending six weeks pushing 8 NAS devices through real video editing workflows, our team has the data you need. The best NAS devices … Read more

I lost a family photo library to a dead laptop hard drive in 2019. Three years of vacation pictures, gone in an afternoon because my “backup strategy” was copying files to the same drive. That painful lesson sent me down the NAS rabbit hole, and I’ve been testing network attached storage devices ever since. Our … Read more