Nathan Reynolds

My old gaming PC sounded like a leaf blower every time I launched a game. The included case fans hit 2000 RPM on day one, and no software tweak could tame them. After swapping in proper PWM case fans for a quiet build, my system now idles at 600 RPM and stays near-silent even under … Read more

If you’ve ever stood in front of a wall of RGB fans trying to figure out which ones will actually cool your build and light it up the way you want, you’re not alone. We spent the last few months swapping 12 different ARGB fan sets through three test rigs, and the differences between them … Read more

I’ve been building PCs for over a decade, and if there’s one component that quietly makes or breaks a system, it’s thermal paste. The best thermal pastes for CPU installs can drop your load temps by 5 to 15 degrees Celsius compared to stock pads, which means quieter fans, longer chip life, and better overclocking … Read more

I spent the last 90 days testing eight GPUs specifically for local LLM inference, running everything from 7B parameter models all the way up to a quantized 70B beast. I burned through electricity, swapped cards between machines, and benchmarked tokens per second with llama.cpp, Ollama, and LM Studio until my office sounded like a jet … Read more

I built three Plex servers in the last two years, and what surprised me most was how often the GPU matters less than the codec support. When somebody in the house starts streaming a 4K HDR remux while another user is watching the same movie on a tablet, the CPU alone will buckle. That is … Read more

I run Plex and Jellyfin servers across two homes, and I have spent the last several months stress-testing every AV1-capable GPU I could get my hands on. AV1 is now the codec that matters most for media servers. It cuts bandwidth roughly 30% compared to H.265 at the same visual quality, which means smoother 4K … Read more

I built my first Plex server in a Dell OptiPlex 9020 SFF case about three years ago, and the moment I tried to drop a full-height GPU inside, I realized the case was about 2 inches too narrow. That’s the SFF Plex struggle in one sentence. You need hardware transcoding for multiple 4K streams, but … Read more

I spent the last six weeks swapping Intel Arc cards in and out of my home lab, running Plex, Jellyfin, and Proxmox workloads around the clock, and I can tell you with confidence that picking the right Intel Arc GPU for a home server changes everything. After burning through hours of 4K transcoding sessions, power … Read more

Finding the right GPU for 1440p gaming in feels harder than it should. The market floods you with options from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, each one shouting about ray tracing, frame generation, or killer price-to-performance ratios. Our team spent the last three months testing ten current-generation graphics cards in the same 1440p test bench. We … Read more

When I built my first AI art rig back in , I underestimated how fast VRAM would become the bottleneck. Six months of Stable Diffusion experimentation taught me that the best GPUs for Stable Diffusion and image generation in aren’t always the most expensive ones — they’re the cards that match your workload, your model … Read more