Nathan Reynolds

Working from home means your WiFi router is now the most important piece of office equipment you own. I have spent the last three months testing eight WiFi 6E routers in real home offices, running Zoom calls while my partner streamed 4K content, my kids took online classes, and 40+ smart home devices competed for … Read more

I moved into a three-story house last year and my old single router died on day one. The basement office had no signal, the upstairs bedroom dropped Zoom calls, and the smart home devices in the garage kept falling off the network. That frustration sent me on a six-month testing journey through the best mesh … Read more

I’ve been building DIY NAS boxes for over a decade, and 2026 is the most interesting year yet for case selection. After testing eight cases over three months across TrueNAS, Unraid, and plain Linux setups, I can tell you the case you pick determines everything from how loud your office runs at 2 a.m. to … Read more

Building a home lab means your server runs 24/7, often hosting Plex, TrueNAS, Proxmox, or Home Assistant. The case you pick affects noise levels, drive bay count, cooling efficiency, and how much hardware you can squeeze in. After spending 60+ hours testing 8 cases across three form factors, I am ready to share what actually … Read more

Last year our team rebuilt a video editing workstation for a 4K documentary project, and we hit the exact problem you might be facing right now. The system kept stalling on multi-cam timelines because we were working with 32GB of consumer DDR4. After testing eight different kits over three months, we finally landed on a … Read more

Building a serious home lab in means your network is the bottleneck, not your gear. After watching 4K streams stutter and VM migrations crawl on 1GbE, I upgraded my own rack with 10 Gigabit Ethernet and never looked back. A quality 10GbE switch turns a sluggish home lab into a workstation-class experience, with NAS backups … Read more

After spending the last three months testing ten dedicated pfSense firewall appliances across home, SOHO, and small business networks, I can tell you that picking the right hardware makes the difference between a network that hums along at gigabit speeds and one that bottlenecks under load. The best pfSense firewall appliances in combine Intel NICs, … Read more

If your home network is starting to feel like a juggling act, you’re not alone. We spent the last three months testing ten wired routers in our own home lab setups, and the difference between a consumer ISP router and a proper best wired router for home lab networks is night and day. Your ISP’s … Read more

Building a high-end Ryzen 9000 series PC starts with picking the right foundation, and the best X870E motherboards for enthusiasts give you the PCIe 5.0 lanes, DDR5 headroom, and USB4 ports that match the hardware you actually want to install. After spending weeks testing X870E boards with the Ryzen 9800X3D and 9950X, our team found … Read more

I upgraded my home network to 2.5GbE last year and immediately saw file transfers jump from 120 MB/s to nearly 300 MB/s on my NAS. That single change made my entire setup feel faster, and I have been helping friends do the same ever since. The best 2.5GbE switches for home networks give you 2.5x … Read more