Tyler Morgan 
I spent the last three months assembling, measuring, and living with ten of the best TV stands with storage I could get my hands on. I weighed loaded-down consoles on bathroom scales, timed assembly start to finish, and shoved real AV receivers, gaming consoles, and even a turntable inside each cabinet. What follows is the … Read more
Floating TV consoles are quietly reshaping how living rooms look and feel. By lifting your entertainment setup off the floor and mounting it to the wall, you free up square footage, simplify cleaning, and give any room an instant modern upgrade. We spent the past several months testing, mounting, and living with twelve of the … Read more
Whether you want to self-host Plex, spin up Docker containers, or build a virtualization playground, a dedicated homelab server gives you full control over your data and services. If you are planning a full media setup, check out our guide to the best hardware for Plex media servers to pair with your new server. After … Read more
If you build, repair, or extend Ethernet cables, the best network cable crimping tool kit lets you terminate RJ45 connectors cleanly, test each run, and skip the junk pre-made patch cables. After three months crimping Cat5e through Cat7 across home labs, server racks, and a few chaotic LAN-party rigs, I landed on 10 kits that … Read more
ECC (Error-Correcting Code) RAM is server-grade memory that detects and corrects single-bit memory errors on the fly, preventing the silent data corruption that bit flips cause in 24/7 home servers, NAS units, and virtualization hosts. After spending three months swapping modules across an AMD Ryzen NAS box, a Xeon E5 workstation, and a dual-socket EPYC … Read more
I built my first homelab from a refurbished Dell PowerEdge R710 tucked under a desk in 2019, and that single machine taught me more about virtualization, networking, and Linux than any certification course. After that experience, I started recommending enterprise servers to friends building homelabs, and I quickly learned that Dell PowerEdge remains the gold … Read more
A homelab server is a small, always-on computer you keep at home to run self-hosted apps, virtualization platforms, game servers, NAS storage, and networking labs. If you’re tired of monthly cloud fees or want to learn enterprise IT skills without breaking the bank, a budget homelab server under $500 is the perfect starting point. Our … Read more
Looking for the best low power servers for home use in ? After running 10 different machines in my home lab for 90 days and tracking every watt on a Kill-A-Watt meter, I can tell you exactly which ones actually idle under 15W, which run completely silent, and which are just dressed-up desktops pretending to … Read more
A quiet homelab server is a low-noise computer (typically under 40 dB at idle) designed to run 24/7 in a home office, bedroom, or living space without distracting occupants, while still delivering enterprise-grade compute, storage, and remote management for virtualization, media, NAS, or game-server workloads. When I built my first home lab six years ago, … Read more
Choosing the best servers for virtualization in is one of those decisions that ripples across every workload you run. I have spent the past 90 days testing ten rack, tower, and microserver platforms across ESXi, Proxmox VE, and Hyper-V, and the gap between “works” and “works well” comes down to CPU core density, ECC RAM … Read more