Hardware Reviews

A review here is an assessment of what a piece of hardware can do for a specific kind of work — not a tour of its box contents.

Every review is scored against the same nine criteria, so that a 7 for thermals means the same thing on a mini PC as on a workstation GPU. The rubric, the score bands and what we measure are all published in our review methodology.

What every review tells you

• The score, and its breakdown across all nine criteria — never a single number with no working shown
• Who should buy it, and who should not
• What it can actually run, stated with the quantisation, because “runs 70B” without qualification means nothing
• The trade-offs, in plain terms — power draw, noise, memory that cannot be upgraded
• What to consider instead, including the previous generation where it remains competitive

About our testing

We are a young publication and we have not physically tested most of the hardware we cover. Rather than imply otherwise, every review states its basis directly under the headline: specification analysis, third-party benchmark synthesis, or hands-on testing.

Specification-led analysis is genuinely useful — memory capacity, bandwidth, bus width and power draw are published facts, and a great deal follows from them. What it cannot tell you is how loud a machine gets after an hour at load, or whether the firmware is any good. Where those questions matter, we say that they are open.