Tyler Morgan

My Steam Deck dies after about 4 hours of Hades II. My ROG Ally X barely lasts 90 minutes on Cyberpunk 2077. If you game on a handheld PC, you already know the pain: one AAA title and your battery is gone before the flight reaches cruising altitude. That is exactly why I spent the … Read more

Retro gaming is having a moment in , and the best retro handheld consoles for emulation have never been more capable. After spending six weeks testing eight popular devices, our team found options that handle everything from 8-bit NES classics to PS2 and GameCube era games. The market is crowded with choices ranging from $40 … Read more

I built my first home network in a tiny apartment with a single router and two powerline adapters. It worked fine for streaming Netflix and checking email. The day I added a NAS, two security cameras, and a WiFi 6 access point, everything started falling apart. IP addresses collided, the cameras hogged bandwidth, and I … Read more

I have installed IP camera systems for everything from a four-camera garage workshop to a 24-camera warehouse, and the single piece of gear that decides whether a surveillance setup “just works” is the PoE switch. A bad choice means dropped cameras at night, choppy footage when everyone walks in at once, and a rack that … Read more

Setting up a home lab used to mean tolerating 1 Gigabit links and watching large VM migrations crawl across the network. I spent my first year running my lab that way, and it was painful. The moment I added a 10GbE SFP+ switch to my rack, everything changed. VM migrations dropped from minutes to seconds, … Read more

Anyone who has tried to game in a quiet room, record voice-over, or sleep next to a home server knows the truth: even a small cooling fan in your network gear is loud enough to ruin the moment. That whirring you hear in the background of your Discord call, the hum in your studio, the … Read more

A rackmount network switch for home lab setups is the backbone that ties your servers, NAS, access points, and gaming rigs into a single fast, reliable network. I built my first home lab in a 12U rack shoved into a closet, and the switch I picked made the difference between a clean, quiet setup and … Read more

Upgrading your home network from 1 Gigabit to 10 Gigabit used to mean spending $500 or more on a switch. After three months of testing budget 10G switches in my home lab, pulling terabytes of data to my NAS, and pushing them through iperf, I can confidently say the landscape has changed. Today, the best … Read more

I built my first home lab with a stack of gigabit switches, and I spent years waiting for file transfers to finish. Once I added a 10GbE network card and the right cabling, the difference was immediate: backups that used to take an hour now finished in under seven minutes, and VM migrations stopped choking … Read more

If your home network is starting to feel like a bottleneck, the best 2.5GbE network card is the cheapest way to break past gigabit speeds without rewiring your house. We spent weeks testing eight PCIe 2.5GbE cards across Windows 11, Linux, and TrueNAS to find the ones that actually deliver the 280 MB/s they promise. … Read more