Tyler Morgan

Building a home lab used to mean dropping four figures on a used enterprise tower. In , I run three Proxmox clusters from a shelf full of refurbished mini PCs that cost less than my monitor. The shift happened because off-lease business machines from the ThinkCentre, EliteDesk, and OptiPlex families deliver 80% of the performance … Read more

I built my first Proxmox cluster in a closet with three mismatched mini PCs and a tangle of Ethernet cables. It worked. It also taught me exactly which specs matter when you want a cluster that does not fall over at 2 AM. This guide covers the best mini PCs for a Proxmox cluster I … Read more

I still remember digging through my closet last year, pulling out a yellowed SNES and a tangle of composite cables, only to discover the power brick had died. Replacement parts cost more than a brand new mini PC. That little moment is exactly why I started testing compact computers for retro gaming. They fit behind … Read more

If you are shopping for the best mini PCs for office and productivity, you have come to the right place. I have spent the last three months running eight different compact desktops through real office workloads: spreadsheets with 50,000 rows, multi-monitor video calls, heavy browser tabs, and back-to-back Teams meetings. What follows is the shortlist … Read more

I have built Raspberry Pi projects for years, and I can tell you the hardest part is never the code. It is the accessories. The first time I unboxed a Pi 4, I spent a full weekend hunting for a compatible micro-HDMI cable, a power supply that did not trigger under-voltage warnings, and a case … Read more

I upgraded from cable to fiber last year, and the day the tech left I was staring at speeds I had never seen in my home. Then I ran a speed test on Wi-Fi and got less than half of what I was paying for. The problem was not the fiber line. It was the … Read more

The Raspberry Pi made single-board computing famous, but a few years of stock problems and rising prices have pushed home server builders toward better options. I spent the last three months running Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Plex, and a stack of Docker containers on eight Raspberry Pi alternatives for home servers, and the results surprised me. … Read more

I built my first home theater PC back in 2011, and it was the size of a dorm fridge. Today, the best mini PCs for 4K media playback are smaller than a paperback book, run whisper quiet, and stream Netflix in HDR without breaking a sweat. After three weeks of testing eight models on my … Read more

Choosing the right single board computer for Home Assistant is the difference between a smart home that hums quietly in the background and one that crashes every weekend. After our team spent three months running eight different SBCs side by side, with loads ranging from 12 devices to 150, we have hard data on what … Read more

After spending three months running eight x86 SBCs as home servers, I can tell you the category has matured fast. Intel’s Alder Lake-N chips (N95, N97, N100, and N150) deliver real server-class performance in fanless packages that sip 6 to 15 watts. Our team at topgameserver.net has been deploying these boards in our own lab … Read more