Richard Lee

The best motherboards 10Gb Ethernet builds rely on are the ones where the network port is not an afterthought. I moved my editing rig onto a 10GbE switch two years ago, and the difference showed up the first time I pulled a 240GB project folder off the NAS in a little over four minutes instead […]

I spent the last 60 days testing Z890 motherboards with the Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 7 265K across 12 gaming workloads, and our team at Mercury PC has a clear picture of which boards actually deliver for Intel Core Ultra gaming builds in . The LGA 1851 socket is here to stay

Finding the best laptops for running local AI models in became my obsession after I spent a weekend trying to load Llama 3 on a thin-and-light with 16GB of soldered RAM. The model crashed before it finished loading, and that frustration sent me down a rabbit hole of testing dozens of machines across three months.

I’ve spent the last 60 days running thermal cameras across eight of the most popular laptop stands with cooling fans, stress-testing them on a gaming laptop during an actual August heatwave. My testing spanned a 17-inch Lenovo Legion, a MacBook Pro 14, and a budget Acer Aspire, running everything from 3DMark Steel Nomad loops to

I spent the last eight weeks testing AM5 motherboards with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D and a 9950X across 14 benchmark runs, three stress tests, and roughly 90 hours of gaming sessions. Pairing the wrong board with a flagship CPU is one of the easiest ways to leave performance on the table, throttle under sustained load,

I’ve spent the last three months building in compact cases and stress-testing wireless performance on ten different Micro-ATX motherboards with WiFi to find what actually works. After installing each board in a test bench, running throughput benchmarks, and checking real-world WiFi stability in a typical apartment with thick walls, I can confidently say which ones

I have been building compact SFF PCs for over a decade, and the hardest spec to lock down on a Mini-ITX motherboard has always been Thunderbolt. Most reviewers lump Thunderbolt boards into generic “best Mini-ITX” lists, which leaves you guessing whether the board actually ships with a working 40Gbps port. Our team spent three months

I’ve spent the last three months testing dual Ethernet motherboard setups across 15 different builds in our lab, pushing everything from a Ryzen 9 9950X gaming rig to a 100TB home server NAS to figure out which boards truly deliver on the dual 2.5Gb Ethernet promise. After 400+ hours of throughput testing, link aggregation trials,

I spent the last three months building rigs with 4 NVMe SSDs stuffed into a single tower, and I’ll tell you straight up: finding a motherboard with four M.2 slots that won’t choke your GPU or thermal-throttle your drives is harder than it should be. Most “4 M.2 slot” claims online bury the fine print

When I built my first all-white gaming PC two years ago, I spent three frustrating weeks hunting for white motherboards that didn’t look like they’d been spray-painted with off-brand hardware store enamel. That painful search is exactly why I wrote this guide. After testing eight white motherboards for gaming PCs over the past four months,