AI Hardware Buying Guides

Every guide here starts from the same question: what are you trying to run?

That is not the question most hardware coverage answers. A GPU review will tell you frame rates; it will not tell you whether the card holds a 32-billion-parameter model in memory, which is the only thing that matters if you are running one. A mini PC review will measure boot time and skip memory bandwidth entirely — the single specification that most determines local inference speed.

So our guides are organised by workload. Each one names the buyer it is written for, states the constraints, and works from there to the hardware. Each one also names who should not buy the recommendation, because a pick with no stated limits is a ranking rather than advice.

How to read a guide here

Every recommendation names its buyer. “Best Overall” always means best overall for the workload in the title, not best in some absolute sense.

Scores follow a published rubric. The nine criteria and what each band means are set out in our review methodology.

The basis of every assessment is stated on the page. Directly under the headline you will find whether a piece rests on manufacturer specifications, on third-party benchmark data, or on hardware we tested ourselves. We do not blur those categories.

We do not publish prices. A price captured at writing is wrong within days. We classify products into broad bands and link out so you see the current figure yourself.