Hardware

This section covers physical hardware — computers, components, networking gear, and the tools used to work on them. The content here comes from hands-on use: actual builds, teardowns, bench testing, and day-to-day experience rather than spec sheet summaries.

Laptops

The Dell Latitude 5430 is a business-class laptop on Intel’s 12th generation platform — the kind of machine that shows up in enterprise environments and on the used market. Well built, repairable, and Linux-compatible.

The ASUS TUF Gaming FX505 and ASUS TUF Gaming FX705 are mid-range gaming laptops that offer solid performance without the premium price of the ROG line. Both run Linux reasonably well.

Desktop builds and components

The site covers several complete builds including a PC Build with the i7-9700k and a Alder Lake gaming system built around the Core i7 12700K and Asus B660M-PLUS TUF Gaming WiFi D4 motherboard.

Component-level coverage includes:

Storage — Samsung 870 EVO, Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe, Kingston A400, SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, and a 870 EVO vs Kingston A400 comparison. If you’re choosing between drives, there’s also a Best M.2 Drive guide.

GPUs and PSUs — EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 and EVGA SuperNOVA 850 GT PSU.

Cases and cooling — Lian Li Lancool 205 Mesh and MSI MAG CORELIQUID P240 AIO.

Memory — Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 16GB DDR4-3200.

Servers

The PowerEdge R940xa is a high-end Dell rack server — covered in the context of home lab and enterprise hardware. The Alienware Aurora R9 is on the opposite end: a consumer gaming desktop that doubles as a capable Linux workstation.

Networking hardware

10GbE — Best 10gb Ethernet Card and Best 10gb Network Switch for upgrading a home lab or NAS setup.

Cabling and switching — Cat 7 Ethernet Cable and the Cisco 4331 Integrated Services Router for those working with enterprise-grade routing hardware.

Teardowns

Teardown content covers what’s actually inside consumer hardware — useful for repair decisions and understanding build quality. Covered hardware includes the Western Digital 2TB hard drive and Western Digital Red Pro 4TB.

The Sabrent USB to SATA Dual Bay Docking Station is worth a look if you’re regularly working with bare drives for imaging, backups, or data recovery.

Videos

This is some of the hardware that we review, Lenovo ThinkPad T14 (Gen 5) vs E16 (Gen 2):

Mac Mini - New and Old: