How we work

A number without a method is a guess.

Racks & Watts is an Elevated Labs publication. We publish hardware buying guides for homelabs, local AI and local-control projects, alongside recorded results from our own test bench. Articles say which measurements are ours and which come from manufacturer documentation.

What earns a recommendation

A recommendation names the job the part is for, the measurement or documentation behind it, the method used, and what we could not verify. We do not invent test results, quotes, benchmark numbers or ratings. A part we have not run gets a documentation-based assessment, labelled as such, never a verdict written as if we had.

Our head-to-head comparisons apply that distinction when choosing between options: check which trade-offs come from recorded tests and which depend on documentation.

How we measure

Power is read at the wall with a plug-in meter and reported as idle and sustained load. GPU figures come from the vendor driver under a named, repeatable workload. LLM throughput is reported in tokens per second with the model, quantisation and runtime named. Noise, when reported, is a phone meter at one metre and is indicative only. Check current prices on Amazon; hardware specifications are from the makers’ sources. Amazon product links are link-only: we do not display Amazon prices, availability, images, customer reviews or star ratings.

Sources and corrections

Product claims link to the manufacturer or retailer page they came from and carry the date we checked. When we find an error we correct the article in place and note the change. Older revisions remain in our project history.

Affiliate relationships

Some outbound links earn a commission. Program availability does not decide which parts appear or in what order, and plain retailer links remain for parts with no program. An affiliate click is not a confirmed sale.