Methodology

How we pick products

Every product we recommend has to clear three bars:

  • Value density. We calculate $/GB VRAM, $/TB, tok/s per dollar, and idle W for all candidates. We recommend products with measurably better ratios unless there's a specific reason to pay more.
  • Availability. We only list products available from major retailers (Amazon, Newegg, B&H). Grey-market or hard-to-find products are noted with a warning.
  • Longevity signals. We prefer products with at least 90-day community track records, active firmware updates, and parts availability.

Power measurements

Idle watt figures come from a combination of:

  • Manufacturer TDP specifications (normalized to idle, not peak)
  • Community measurements from r/homelab, ServeTheHome, and STH forums
  • Our own wall-meter measurements where we have physical access to hardware

We use idle power for operating cost calculations because homelabs spend >95% of their time at idle. Peak/load wattage is shown separately where available.

Price data

Prices are pulled monthly from Amazon, Newegg, and B&H APIs. We show the lowest current price from a major retailer. Prices shown in our tools are estimates — always click through to verify before purchasing.

Used/refurbished prices (e.g., for the RTX 3090) are averages from eBay sold listings over the prior 30 days.

AI inference benchmarks

Token-per-second figures come from the llama.cpp benchmark suite, community results on r/LocalLLaMA, and the LM Studio benchmark database. All figures assume:

  • Q4_K_M quantization unless otherwise noted
  • 512-token prompt, 1024-token generation
  • Single-GPU configuration
  • Ubuntu 24.04 with the latest CUDA or ROCm drivers

Affiliate policy

We earn commissions when you purchase through our links. This is how WisePC is funded.

Our policy:

  • We never accept payment to change rankings. Affiliate relationships are disclosed on every product link.
  • If a product we don't have an affiliate relationship for is genuinely better, we still recommend it. We just won't earn on the click.
  • We don't run sponsored content or paid reviews.
  • If our affiliate relationship with a retailer ends, our recommendations don't change — we just update the links.

See our full affiliate disclosure for the list of current affiliate programs.

Update cadence

Price data: monthly. Power measurements: updated when new community data contradicts our current figures. Tool logic: updated when hardware generations shift value tiers significantly.