LM Studio Hardware Requirements
The requirements belong to the model, not the app — but LM Studio hands you the GPU offload slider Ollama hides, which changes how you size and troubleshoot a machine.
AI Gear Stack Editorial
The AI Gear Stack editorial desk. Articles published under this byline are researched, written and fact-checked by the editorial team against our published review methodology. Individual contributor profiles are added as named authors join the masthead — we do not publish under invented expert personas.
Stable Diffusion GPU Requirements
What image generation actually needs, model by model — and why the answer changed when the 12-billion-parameter models arrived.
Best GPUs Under $1,000 for AI
The best card at this budget is usually not a current one. New tops out at 16 GB; used reaches 24 — and that is the step from 14B models to 32B.
Best NAS for AI Developers
A NAS for model weights is optimised differently from one for media — throughput, cache and memory matter, and the transcoding engine everyone advertises does not.
Best NAS Drives for AI Datasets
The enclosure is the visible decision; the drives determine whether the array survives its first failure. CMR, workload ratings, and the batch-diversity habit nobody mentions.
Best Mini PCs for Developers
Sustained multi-core performance is what makes a development machine feel fast — and configured TDP, which no listing publishes, is why two boxes with the same CPU differ by 30%.
Best AI Workstations Under $2,000
What this budget actually reaches — 16 GB comfortably, 24 GB used — and the one thing it does not buy at any price: 70B-class models.
Best KVM Switches for Developers and Homelabs
Check your monitor first — many already have one. If not: two different products share this name, and bandwidth and EDID handling are where the cheap ones fail.
Best 10GbE Network Adapters and Cards
The half of every link people forget to budget for. Which card to buy, why SFP+ runs at a third of the power, and the slot and driver checks that catch people out.
Best 10GbE Switches for Homelabs
Ten-gigabit at home is now silent and cheap — but only worth buying if your storage can fill it. The SFP+ versus copper decision, and the four switches worth considering.
Best GPUs for Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI
Image generation inverts the usual AI hardware advice — compute decides your speed, not memory bandwidth, and a card we call limited for LLMs can be close to ideal here.
Best Monitors for Developers
Pixel density decides whether text is comfortable all day — and the right target depends on whether you are on macOS, Windows or Linux. Plus why OLED is the wrong panel for code.