Max

I've spent more than 20 years in IT, and I've been building custom PCs since 2000 — my first build ran an Intel i486DX, assembled from parts when most people were unboxing prebuilts. That habit of choosing every component myself never went away; it just moved from tower cases to the mini PCs this site is about.

Professionally I started on the datacenter floor as a technician — racking servers, tracing cables, learning what hardware reliability actually means when machines run 24/7. From there I moved into infrastructure and capacity planning. Power budgets, thermals, and virtualization aren't abstractions to me; they were my day job.

Since the original ChatGPT release I've been deep in local AI. I run open models — Gemma, Qwen, Mistral and others — on my own hardware: discrete GPUs and an Apple Mac Studio M2 with 32GB of unified memory, alongside a Mac Mini M4 that handles daily duty. When this site discusses what a given amount of RAM means for local LLM inference, that comes from machines on my own desk.

How I work

Mini PC Lab is research-driven. Every product recommendation is verified against the live Amazon listing and manufacturer documentation, power and performance figures are cited from named reviewer measurements and consistent owner reports, and I read the critical reviews so you don't have to. Where I have first-hand experience — Apple Silicon, local AI workloads, infrastructure planning — I say so directly; where the data comes from someone else's bench, I name the source.

Questions, corrections, or a mini PC you think deserves coverage? See theabout page for how this site operates and how affiliate links support it. You can also find me onGitHub.