Hardware Editor · since 2019

Voltage

My idea of a good weekend is a repaste and a spreadsheet full of thermals. I cover GPUs, CPUs and the build decisions that actually move frame rates, and I'd rather show you the numbers than repeat a press release.

PC hardwaregraphics cardsCPUsPC buildingcooling and thermalspower suppliesprice-to-performance analysis

Latest by Voltage

Macro photo of rows of identical blank black memory chips on a circuit board, their pins lit in indigo-violet against a near-black background

Qwen3.8 27B Hardware Requirements: VRAM by Quant, and Why Context Costs So Little

A 24 GB card runs Qwen3.8 27B at Q4 or Q5. Q8 needs 32 GB. The surprise is the context cache: 128K tokens costs about 8 GB, a quarter of what an older 32B model charges.

Voltage · 19h ago · 9 min

Low-angle photo of a row of blank matte memory modules on a motherboard in the foreground, with a plain graphics card blurred behind them under indigo and coral light

Best MoE Models for a 12GB or 16GB GPU: The --n-cpu-moe Number and the RAM Each Needs

Seven mixture-of-experts models, from gpt-oss 20B to Qwen3 235B, split into what stays on your card and what moves to system RAM. The card barely changes. The RAM you need goes from 16 GB to 96 GB.

Voltage · 4d ago · 10 min

Low-angle macro photo of the front edge of a small silver aluminum desktop computer on a dark desk, a tiny green status light glowing, violet and coral light behind it

Hardware

Before You Buy a Mac Mini for Local AI, Read This (It’ll Save You $1,800)

I mapped every Mac mini and Mac Studio Apple sells today, all 17 configs, against 13 popular local AI models. If your biggest model is 27B-class, the math says a $1,299 Mac mini holds what a $3,099 Mac Studio holds.

Voltage · 4d ago · 16 min