TechFuel HQ

Name: TechFuelHQ PSU Tier List 2026
Creator: TechFuelHQ
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

What DDR5 RAM Actually Costs Right Now: 16GB to 128GB Kit Price Check

LK Wood IV — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-08-01 · Prices last checked 2026-08-01 · ~9 min read · St. Louis County, MO

Prices last checked: August 1, 2026

Reading Newegg's own DDR5-6000 CL30 listings that morning: a single 16GB module opened at $214.99, a 32GB (2x16GB) kit at $399.99, a 64GB (2x32GB) kit at $869.99, and the cheapest 128GB (2x64GB) kit at $2,999.99. The independent US tracker WhereIsMyRam put the 32GB DDR5-6000 CL30 floor at $400 the same day and showed the market up 13.7% over the prior 30 days.

These are observed listing prices on one dated morning, not a live feed. Every figure below links to the page it came from. For why memory got this expensive, see the 2026 RAM and SSD price crisis; for which specific kit to buy, see the DDR5 buying guide.

If you searched for what a 32GB DDR5-6000 CL30 kit costs, the answer on August 1, 2026 is roughly $400 to $420, with the cheapest listing at $399.99. That is the number this page exists to give you, with the date attached and a link to where it came from, because a memory price without a date is close to useless in 2026.

Below: the same treatment for every capacity tier, the per-gigabyte math that makes one of them a bad deal, what moved last month, and a straight answer on whether to buy now.

16GB: the cheapest entry, and the worst per-gigabyte deal

Newegg’s 16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 listings on August 1, 2026 opened with a single Patriot Viper Venom 16GB module (PVV516G60C30) at $214.99, timings 30-40-40-76 at 1.35V. The cheapest two-stick 16GB kit in that same listing was G.SKILL’s Flare X5 2x8GB at $264.99.

Divide those out and 16GB is the tier that punishes you. The $214.99 module is about $13.44 per gigabyte by my arithmetic. The 32GB kit below is $12.50 per gigabyte. You are paying more per gigabyte for less memory, and the cheapest 16GB option here is a single module rather than a kit, so a two-slot board runs with one of its memory channels empty until you buy a second stick.

Buy 16GB only if the budget is hard-capped and you know the machine’s job. Anything that touches modern games, browser tabs by the dozen, or a container or two has outgrown it. Our breakdown of how much RAM you actually need walks the capacity question by workload rather than by price.

32GB DDR5-6000 CL30: the number most people came for

This is the tier the search traffic is asking about, so here is the full listing spread from Newegg’s DDR5-6000 CL30 results on August 1, 2026:

The XPG LANCER 2x16GB (AX5U6000C3016G-DCLABK) was the cheapest at $399.99, carrying Newegg’s own “lowest price in 30 days” flag. The RGB version of the same kit and Patriot’s Viper Elite 5 2x16GB both listed at $409.99. V-COLOR’s Manta XSky was $419.99. From there the branded tier climbs fast: Team T-Force Delta RGB at $489.99, Corsair Vengeance RGB at $509.99, and G.SKILL’s Trident Z5 Neo RGB at $599.99. Those are list prices; several carried stacking promo codes at the time of the check, so the number at checkout can land below the number on the tile.

That $200 spread between the cheapest and most expensive 32GB CL30 kit is the single most actionable fact on this page. Every kit in it carries the same rated speed and the same rated latency. In a normal market, paying up for a familiar brand is a defensible $30 decision. At current pricing it is a $200 one.

Cross-checking against a second source: WhereIsMyRam’s US price chart listed the DDR5-6000 CL30 32GB minimum at $400 on the same day, within a dollar of Newegg’s floor. The tracker aggregates US retail listings and states that Amazon prices are excluded from its charts, which is why I use it as the independent check here.

Two more figures from that tracker worth knowing before you buy a speed grade: DDR5-6000 CL36 sat at $380 against $400 for CL30, so tightening the timings at 6000 cost about $20 at this capacity. DDR5-6400 CL32 was $390 and DDR5-5600 CL36 was $376.

64GB: double the capacity for slightly more than double the money

Newegg’s 64GB DDR5-6000 CL30 listings on August 1, 2026 bottomed out at V-COLOR’s Manta XFinity RGB 2x32GB (TMXFL3260830KWK) at $869.99. G.SKILL’s Trident Z5 Neo RGB was $995.55, Kingston’s FURY Beast $1,049.99, and Corsair’s Vengeance 2x32GB $1,159.99.

At $869.99 the 64GB tier runs about $13.59 per gigabyte, roughly 9% worse per gigabyte than the 32GB kit. So the honest framing is not “64GB costs twice as much as 32GB.” It costs about 2.2 times as much, and the extra 32GB you are buying arrives at a worse rate than the first 32GB did.

Ignore that penalty if a real workload needs the capacity: virtual machines, large video timelines, a local model that spills out of VRAM. Do not accept it to buy 64GB “to be safe” on a gaming build. At these prices, unused capacity is the most expensive thing on a parts list.

128GB: the tier where the math breaks

Two very different products both get sold as 128GB, and the gap between them is enormous.

Going through 2x64GB modules, Newegg’s 128GB DDR5-6000 listings started at V-COLOR’s Manta XFinity RGB at $2,999.99, and note that it is CL32 rather than CL30 (1.35V, 32-45-45-96). G.SKILL’s Flare X5 and Ripjaws S5 2x64GB kits were $3,249.99 at CL34, and the Trident Z5 Neo RGB was $3,299.99. That $2,999.99 entry point is about $23.44 per gigabyte, nearly double the 32GB rate.

Going through four 32GB modules instead, the same 128GB kit search showed A-Tech’s 4x32GB DDR5-5600 CL46 kit at $1,858.33 and Kingston’s FURY Beast 4x32GB DDR5-5200 CL40 at $2,399.99. The A-Tech kit is roughly $14.52 per gigabyte, which puts it back in line with the rest of the ladder and saves about $1,142 against the 2x64GB route.

The catch is real, not theoretical. You give up the 6000 speed grade, you accept looser timings, and you fill all four DIMM slots, which our DDR5 buying guide covers as the configuration that most reliably costs you rated speed. For a workstation or homelab box where capacity is the entire point and memory clock is not, that trade is usually correct. For anything where the RAM speed matters, the 2x64GB premium is what the convenience costs.

What moved over the last month

WhereIsMyRam’s US market summary on August 1, 2026 showed a 7-day change of +0.9% and a 30-day change of +13.7%, across 1,293 in-stock references, and labeled the week a strong upward trend. The tracker follows 2x16GB kits, and the cheapest tracked configuration at any speed was the $376 DDR5-5600 CL36 entry above.

That 30-day figure is a market-wide aggregate across those 1,293 references, not the move on any one kit. The tracked market rose nearly 14% while a buyer waited.

The honest complication comes from the same tracker: at the individual configuration level it describes DDR5-6000 CL30 as trading at its cheapest level in recent weeks, and Newegg flags the $399.99 XPG LANCER as its own lowest price in 30 days. Both are true. Specific SKUs dip inside a rising market when retailers clear individual lines. Read that as a reason to buy a well-priced kit today, not as a tier that keeps falling.

Buy now or wait: the call, and the reasoning

Buy when you need it. Not because prices are good, but because the supply picture that sets them has no near-term fix.

TrendForce’s July 30, 2026 memory outlook puts the DRAM sufficiency ratio at about -1% to -2% for 2026 and expects the supply-demand gap to widen further in 2027, with DRAM prices on an upward trajectory. Its structural explanation matters more than the forecast: HBM manufacturing requires significantly more wafer input than conventional DRAM, so higher wafer starts do not translate proportionally into additional bit output. More fab capacity does not automatically mean more DIMMs.

Notably, TrendForce splits the two halves of the memory market in that same release. NAND flash supply loosens in the second half of 2027 as new capacity arrives and consumer demand stays weak. DRAM does not. If you have been assuming RAM and SSDs recover together, that assumption is now explicitly contradicted by the forecaster.

The independent read agrees. PCWorld’s April 24, 2026 investigation into the softening that showed up in some regional markets argued the dips were inventory and demand-elasticity effects on top of a structurally tight market rather than a real reversal. Analyst Patrick Moorhead, quoted in that piece, expected conditions to start improving in Q4 2027 and said he did not think the market would be, in his words, “normalized until 2030.”

So the timing bet is not “wait a month.” Taking the earlier of those two dates, it is “wait until late 2027.” If your build can genuinely sit idle for five quarters, waiting is defensible. If it cannot, you are paying an option premium on a market two named sources expect to keep climbing.

When NOT to upgrade

The buy-now advice above applies to memory you actually need. It is not an argument for touching a working machine. Four cases where the right move is to leave it alone:

You are on 32GB and nothing is swapping. Open your task manager under your real workload, not while idle. If committed memory sits below your installed capacity, more RAM buys you nothing. At $400 a kit, “future-proofing” is the most expensive placebo in a 2026 build.

You are running DDR4 and it is stable. A DDR4-to-DDR5 move is a platform change: new CPU, new board, new memory. At $399.99 for the 32GB kit, the memory line alone is now one of the largest items in that upgrade. Unless the CPU is the actual bottleneck, that money does more work in a GPU.

You want to go from CL36 to CL30 at the same capacity. The timing difference costs about $20 when you are already buying, per the tracker figures above. Buying a whole replacement kit to get it means paying $400 to retire working memory. Take tighter timings on a purchase you were making anyway, never as a standalone upgrade.

You are adding a second module to reach an odd total. Memory is sold in matched kits because the modules in one are validated to run together at their rated profile; two sticks bought separately carry no such validation. At current prices a pairing that will not hold its rated speed is an expensive experiment. If you need more, buy a matched kit and sell the old one.

For what a build looks like when memory is priced as the fixed cost it has become, our budget AM5 build was specced around this market rather than against it.

How these numbers were checked

Every price on this page was read on August 1, 2026 from a public retail listing page or an independent price tracker, and each one links to the exact page it came from. Newegg listings supplied the per-capacity figures; WhereIsMyRam supplied the independent cross-check and the market movement figures. The per-gigabyte figures are my own division of those listed prices by capacity, shown so you can check the arithmetic.

Two limits, stated plainly. The retailer links are search pages, so they show today’s prices rather than the ones printed here, which means these exact figures are not reproducible later from the link. And these are list prices: promo codes moved several kits below their listed number on the day I checked, so treat every figure here as a ceiling.

There is no first-party bench data on this page and no test bench behind it. This is a dated price observation, which is what the question calls for. Prices at these retailers move daily. Treat the figures here as the shape of the market on the date printed, and confirm the live number at the link before you spend.

The bottom line

As of August 1, 2026, DDR5-6000 CL30 runs about $12.50 per gigabyte at 32GB, $13.44 at 16GB and $13.59 at 64GB. At 128GB the cheapest DDR5-6000 option is a CL32 kit at $23.44 per gigabyte, or about $14.52 if you drop to a 4x32GB DDR5-5600 kit. The 32GB tier is both the volume sweet spot and the best rate on the ladder, which is unusual and worth taking advantage of.

Buy the capacity your workload actually uses, take the cheapest listing that meets your spec rather than the familiar brand, and do not wait for a correction that the supply forecasts do not support. If you are still deciding which specific kit, the DDR5 buying guide has the picks; if you want the full explanation of how memory got here, the price crisis piece has the cause.

Best Hardware for Frigate NVR (2026)

LK Wood IV — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-30 · Updated 2026-07-30 · ~12 min read · St. Louis County, MO

Some retailer links below are Amazon affiliate links; if you buy through them TechFuel HQ may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Commissions never influence which products get recommended — see our disclosure.

TL;DR · Frigate hardware, sized by camera count

1–6 cameras, low activity: an Intel N100/N150 mini PC with 16GB RAM. Frigate's own list names the N100-based Beelink EQ13 for "several 1080p cameras with low-medium activity."
6–12 cameras: step to a modern Core i-series box (Frigate names the 1220P and 125H classes) and 16GB.
12+ cameras, high activity: multiple accelerators or a discrete GPU, per Frigate's planning docs.
Skip the Coral. Frigate now says it is "no longer recommended for new Frigate installations" outside low-power edge cases. Use the iGPU via OpenVINO — it's free.
Check AVX before you buy used. Frigate requires AVX+AVX2; Celeron and Pentium parts before 2020's Tiger Lake "typically lack AVX."
The drive is where the money leaks. A 4TB Seagate SkyHawk at $149.99 is $37.50/TB; a 1TB WD Purple at $162.94 costs more for a quarter of the space. Prices dated 2026-07-30.

Requirements and capability wording are quoted from Frigate's own documentation. Prices are a live Amazon US snapshot taken 2026-07-30 and move week to week — check the retailer link before buying. We do not own a Frigate rig and publish no first-party benchmarks here.

Most “Frigate hardware” pages answer a narrower question than the one people actually ask. They list a minimum spec — 4GB, AVX2, an accelerator — and stop. But the thing you actually need to know is how much box do I need for my number of cameras, and that answer is scattered across a docs page, a GitHub discussion, and a Facebook group.

It’s a conspicuous gap. Ask Google right now and its AI Overview summarises the requirements and then closes by asking you for the missing input: “If you tell me how many cameras you plan to use and their resolutions, I can help you pick the right mini PC or processor configuration.” (AI Overview for “frigate hardware requirements”, US/English, observed 2026-07-30; this wording varies between sessions and is not stable.) The machine knows what the table should contain. None of the top-ranking results we checked for that query on 2026-07-30 published it.

So here it is, sized by camera count, with every requirement traced to Frigate’s own documentation, and every price dated and attributed to the listing it came from.

The three gates before you spend anything

AVX and AVX2, or nothing works. Frigate’s planning guide requires “a CPU with AVX + AVX2 instructions.” Most modern processors carry both — but the exception is exactly the hardware people buy for a cheap NVR. Frigate spells it out: “Intel Celeron and Pentium models prior to the 2020 Tiger Lake generation typically lack AVX.” That cheap used mini-desktop with a Celeron is a dead end. Check the specific model on Intel’s ARK before you buy, not after.

Hardware decoding, which is not the same as detection. Frigate’s video decoding docs say “it is highly recommended to use an integrated or discrete GPU for hardware acceleration video decoding in Frigate,” because pulling apart camera streams is the CPU-heavy half of the workload. This is the part people under-buy: they budget for an AI accelerator and forget that decoding eats a CPU alive without an iGPU.

RAM, in three published tiers. Frigate gives real numbers rather than a vague “more is better”:

Tier	Frigate’s wording	What it assumes
4GB	“generally sufficient for a very basic Frigate setup”	A few cameras, plus a dedicated detector
8GB	“should be considered the minimum”	Once enrichments run — face recognition, license plates
16GB	“is highly recommended”	8+ cameras, or heavy enrichment use

Note that Frigate also holds recording cache in /dev/shm, sized separately from the above. Our Frigate NVR storage calculator computes that value alongside the disk estimate, because getting it wrong is a common first-install failure.

The camera-count ladder

Frigate publishes activity-based guidance in its planning docs, and names specific machines in its recommended hardware list. Neither is a buying table on its own. Combined, they are:

Cameras	Activity	Frigate’s guidance	Practical box	Detector
1–6	Low	a single, entry-level AI accelerator is sufficient	Intel N100/N150 mini PC, 16GB	iGPU via OpenVINO
6–12	Moderate	more processing power required	Modern Core i-series (Frigate names 1220P, 125H classes), 16GB	iGPU via OpenVINO
12+	High	multiple entry-level AI accelerators, or a more powerful single unit such as a discrete GPU	Desktop/server CPU + discrete GPU or Hailo	Hailo-8 or dGPU
40+	Commercial	a modern discrete GPU	Server-class, out of scope here	dGPU

Frigate’s own capability notes for the named machines: the Beelink EQ13 (N100) “can run object detection on several 1080p cameras with low-medium activity”; the 1220P class “can handle a large number of 1080p cameras with high activity”; the 125H class “can handle a significant number of 1080p cameras with high activity.”

Activity matters as much as count. Frigate gates object detection behind motion detection, so a quiet scene costs far less to run than a busy one. Six cameras pointed at a quiet side yard is a genuinely different load from six cameras on a busy street, and Frigate’s own tiering is written in those terms — which is why a flat “cameras → CPU” table from any other site is misleading. If your cameras see constant motion, size up one row.

The Coral question, settled by the people who make Frigate

This is where most of the internet is out of date, including the AI Overview’s own sources.

Frigate’s hardware documentation now states plainly: “The Coral is no longer recommended for new Frigate installations, except in deployments with particularly low power requirements or hardware incapable of utilizing alternative AI accelerators for object detection.” Frigate adds that it “will continue to provide support for the Coral TPU for as long as practicably possible,” so nobody with a working Coral is stranded.

Two things follow, and they save real money:

On an Intel box, the free option is the right one. The integrated GPU handles decoding via Quick Sync and runs detection through Frigate’s OpenVINO detector. One chip, both jobs, zero add-in cost. For the 1–12 camera range that covers most homes, this is the whole answer.

Where a dedicated accelerator genuinely helps, it’s Hailo now. Frigate states that it “supports both the Hailo-8 and Hailo-8L AI Acceleration Modules on compatible hardware platforms,” and lists them among its officially supported detectors. They are not cheap — and the price gap against the deprecated part is stark:

Accelerator	Price (2026-07-30)	Status in Frigate’s docs
Coral M.2, Dual Edge TPU	$55.99	“No longer recommended for new installations”
Hailo AI HAT+ (Pi 5), listed at 13 TOPS	$129.99	Supported detector
Hailo-8 M.2, listed at 26 TOPS	$214.99	Supported detector

Yes, the 26 TOPS Hailo-8 costs nearly four times the deprecated Coral, and the 13 TOPS HAT+ about twice. That tension is real, and none of the top-ranking pages we checked on 2026-07-30 resolves it, so here is the resolution: on an Intel machine you buy neither. OpenVINO on the iGPU is already paid for. Reach for a Hailo when you are on hardware with no usable iGPU — a Raspberry Pi 5, say — or when you are past a dozen busy cameras.

One shopping warning. Searching for these modules returns a swamp. In an automated Amazon US product search for “Hailo-8L M.2” on 2026-07-30, the returned listings included a Raspberry Pi case at $94.99, an NVMe adapter HAT at $25.99, and — in paid slots — CNC carbide inserts and a linear-motion stage. Read the title on every listing. The cheapest genuine Hailo-8 module we could verify was $214.99, not the $25.99 that a price sort will happily show you.

Boxes worth buying, priced 2026-07-30

Machine	Why	Specs	Price
GMKtec G3S (entry)	Lowest-cost pick in this table, for 1–4 low-activity cameras — but see the RAM caveat below	N95 · 8GB · 256GB SSD	$249.99
Beelink EQ-series (N150)	Newer N-series part; ships with RAM and storage included	N150 · 12GB LPDDR5 · 500GB	$309
Beelink S12 Pro (best for most)	16GB out of the box — the tier Frigate calls “highly recommended”	N100 · 16GB DDR4 · 500GB	$339

The trap that costs the most money in 2026: barebone boxes. A barebone mini PC with no RAM and no SSD looks like the value play, and it is not. RAM prices rose steeply through the 2026 memory shortage. The sticker on a barebone unit is a down payment — once you add a DDR5 SO-DIMM kit and an NVMe drive, a “cheap” barebone routinely lands above a complete box that shipped with both. Buy the machine that already includes RAM and storage, or buy a used enterprise micro that does. We work through that math in detail in our best mini PCs for a homelab guide.

If your NVR will also be your smart-home hub, the sizing question changes and we cover it separately in best mini PC for Home Assistant — that page is about a Home Assistant box that also watches a few cameras. This page is about a machine whose main job is cameras. If you want both roles isolated on one machine, our Home Assistant on Proxmox guide covers the virtualisation route.

Storage: where the real money leaks

Frigate’s docs are clear on roles. SSDs “are designed with advanced wear-leveling algorithms” and give you a responsive UI and quick clip retrieval — good for the OS and database. For the relentless 24/7 write load of recording, Frigate points at NVR-rated drives like WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk, “engineered for 24/7 operation and continuous write workloads.”

Then you go shopping and find the pricing is a minefield. Live Amazon US, 2026-07-30:

Drive	Price	Cost per TB
Seagate SkyHawk 4TB (ST4000VXZ16)	$149.99	$37.50
WD Purple 6TB (WD60PURZ)	$289.99	$48.33
WD Purple 4TB (WD44PURZ)	$219	$54.75
WD Purple 3TB (WD33PURZ)	$215	$71.67
WD Purple 1TB (WD11PURZ)	$162.94	$162.94

Read that bottom row twice. The 1TB WD Purple at $162.94 costs more than the 4TB SkyHawk at $149.99 — you can buy four times the capacity for $12.95 less. And at identical 4TB capacity in the same NVR-rated class, the WD Purple carries a 46% premium over the SkyHawk.

Two rules fall out of it, both bounded to these prices. At this pricing, sub-4TB surveillance drives are never the value pick — run the per-TB number before buying a small one; the pattern usually reflects small capacities being stocked for replacement buyers rather than builders. And check both brands at your target capacity every time, because the badge premium moves and neither brand is reliably cheaper.

Three caveats stated plainly. These are single-listing snapshots taken on one day at one retailer, and they look high against pre-2026 street prices — drive prices move faster than we can re-publish, so treat the per-TB column as a method rather than a price list. Model numbers, capacities and the TOPS figures above are as given in the retailer listings on 2026-07-30, not verified against manufacturer spec sheets. And on annual workload rating — often cited as the reason to pay the WD premium — Seagate states that SkyHawk drives “can support workloads up to 180TB per year,” the same figure the WD Purple listing quotes. On that specification the two are equivalent, so it is not a reason to pay 46% more. We have not tested any of these drives; every rating here is the manufacturer’s own. For drive selection beyond surveillance duty, see best NAS hard drives.

Size it before you buy it. Retention days, camera count, resolution, and codec drive the number far more than intuition suggests — going from 1080p to 4K on eight cameras is not a small adjustment. Put your actual numbers into the Frigate NVR storage calculator and buy against the result. It also computes the /dev/shm value Frigate needs, which is the setting most first-time installs get wrong.

Don’t forget the network side

Cameras need power and bandwidth, and PoE switches are budgeted in watts, not ports. A switch with eight PoE ports and a 60W budget will not run eight 15W cameras. Work out the real figure with our PoE budget calculator before ordering, because “8-port PoE” tells you almost nothing about what it can actually power.

What we’d actually buy

Four 1080p cameras on a quiet property: Beelink S12 Pro (N100, 16GB) at $339, OpenVINO on the iGPU, one 4TB SkyHawk at $149.99. No accelerator. Around $490 all-in before cameras.
Eight cameras, mixed activity: the same 16GB tier is Frigate’s “highly recommended” line — stay on it, step the CPU to a Core i-series box, and move to 6TB or dual 4TB drives.
Twelve or more, busy scenes: this is where Frigate’s docs say multiple accelerators or a real GPU, and where a Hailo-8 at $214.99 starts earning its price.

The honest summary: for the majority of home installs, Frigate is not demanding hardware. It’s demanding about two specific things — AVX2 and hardware decoding — and generous about everything else. Most people over-buy the accelerator and under-buy the drive. Do it the other way around.

Sources

Frigate’s own documentation, fetched 2026-07-30:

Recommended hardware — named machines, capability wording, Coral and Hailo status
Planning a new installation — RAM tiers, AVX requirement, camera-count guidance, drive recommendations
Video decoding — hardware acceleration guidance
Object detectors — OpenVINO and Hailo detector configuration

Prices are a live Amazon US snapshot taken 2026-07-30 via automated retail lookup, with product titles read individually to exclude accessories and bundles. Per-TB figures are our arithmetic on those listed prices. We do not own a Frigate installation and publish no first-party benchmarks on this page; all capability claims are Frigate’s own words, quoted and linked.

PSU Tier List 2026: Power Supply Tiers, Every Row Sourced

LK Wood IV — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-29 · ~14 min read · St. Louis County, MO

Search for a PSU tier list right now and the top results include a Linus Tech Tips forum thread whose own title says [OLD], posted in July 2016; the Cultists Network list, whose current revision 17.0g is dated November 2023; and a scattering of YouTube Shorts. Power supplies moved on: ATX 3.1, the revised 12V-2x6 connector, and a generation of refreshed platforms arrived after most of those lists stopped being maintained.

This page is our answer: a tier database of 28 current power supply families, rebuilt from scratch for the ATX 3.x era. It has two rules the old lists never enforced, and one column none of them carry.

The rules: every specification traces to a source linked in its row — the manufacturer’s own page where one is reachable, otherwise the professional review that published the specification — and every tier placement leans on a test linked right next to it, meaning Cybenetics certification data and hands-on reviews from outlets that load-test on real equipment. Where we could not verify something, the cell is blank. Blank beats guessed.

The column nobody else has: what these units do at the low loads a 24/7 homelab actually runs at, where the 80 PLUS badge on the box is silent. More on that below the table.

How the tiers are decided

Tier letters are our editorial call, but they are derived from stated criteria, so you can audit any placement:

Tier S — a top-of-class professional verdict, a 10-year-or-longer warranty, and either elite measured performance or elite efficiency and noise results. These are the units reviewers compare everything else against.
Tier A — excellent units with strong professional verdicts and warranties of at least seven years, held out of S by one real finding: price, a transient-response result, a shorter warranty than the class leaders, or weak light-load efficiency.
Tier B — good units with a caveat you should know before buying: a louder fan profile, an older ATX 3.0 revision still on shelves, a warranty we could not verify, or a rival that simply tests better at the same price.
Tier C — the budget class. Fine choices when right-sized and bought at the right price, with bigger compromises: Bronze certification, fixed cabling, shorter warranties, or weak efficiency at the extremes.
Avoid — reserved for units whose failures a professional outlet has documented and stood behind. Two entries qualify, both cited.

Four housekeeping notes, because honesty about method is the whole point of this page. First, several 2023–2024 lines were silently refreshed from ATX 3.0/12VHPWR to ATX 3.1/12V-2x6; where the professional review covers the older build, the row says which revision the verdict describes. Second, we name a unit’s OEM platform only when the linked review states it — PSU platform attribution is a folklore-rich area and we do not repeat folklore. Third, rows for units with no independent test behind them were left out; the ones we considered and dropped are listed at the bottom of this page.

The fourth note is an exception we want on the record rather than buried. One row — the EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 GT — carries no independent lab test, because no major outlet ever published one for the GT line. It is in the table anyway, in Tier C, because we ran one for an extended period in a working build and published our own long-term review. That is first-party experience, not a lab bench, and its row says so. It is the only row that rests on our own bench rather than an outlet’s, and if that distinction matters more to you than the hands-on account, treat the row as informational.

The 2026 PSU tier list

Filter by the wattage class you are shopping and the price band you can stomach. Every row stays in the page for search engines and AI assistants regardless of filters; the chips only hide rows on your screen.

28 units, every placement sourced updated 2026-07-29 · open data (JSON)

Tier S — the units reviewers benchmark against

Tier S power supplies — each row lists the unit's specification as published by the source linked in that row, and the sourced reason for its placement.
Power supply	Wattages	Standard	Efficiency	Warranty	At 24/7 idle load	Why it is here	Sources
Corsair RMx (2024, ATX 3.1)	750–1000W	ATX 3.112V-2x6	Cybenetics Gold	10 yr	77.2% at 20W and 0.018W standby (Cybenetics, 115V); 89.5% at 100W in KitGuru's 240V testing	KitGuru rated the RM850x (2024) 9/10 with a Must Have award for power quality, build quality and cabling, on a CWT platform. Corsair rates this generation via Cybenetics rather than an 80 PLUS badge (per KitGuru). Cybenetics also measured the lowest standby draw of any ATX unit here.	spec · review
NZXT C850 / C1000 Gold (ATX 3.1)	850–1000W	ATX 3.112V-2x6 600W	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Goldnoise A	10 yr	Hardware Busters: efficient at light and super-light loads, high even at 2% load (~20W)	Hardware Busters measured the C1000 (CWT CXT platform) at top overall performance for its class, quiet up to ~790W with strong light-load efficiency; KitGuru scored the white version 9/10. Its only recurring criticism is price.	review
FSP Hydro Ti Pro	850–1000W	ATX 3.012VHPWR 600W	80 PLUS TitaniumCybenetics Titaniumnoise A++	10 yr	74.1% at a 20W (2%) load, 0.076W standby, 12.65 dBA average noise (Cybenetics, 1000W unit)	KitGuru scored the in-house FSP Titanium platform 9.5/10. Cybenetics measured a 12.65 dBA average noise level — the quietest unit in this table — alongside a top-tier low-load result, which is exactly what a 24/7 box wants.	spec · review
be quiet! Dark Power 13	750–1000W	ATX 3.112V-2x6	80 PLUS Titanium	10 yr	74.5% at 20W, 0.068W standby (Cybenetics, 115V, 1000W); Club386's own bench measured 72.0% at 20W and 92.5% at 80W	Club386 awarded the Dark Power 13 1000W Recommended for electrical performance, quiet running and thermal management, and Cybenetics measured roughly 18 dBA average noise — near-silent, with a solid mid-pack low-load result. Current pages state ATX 3.1 with native 12V-2x6; the reviewed launch build was ATX 3.0.	spec · review

Tier A — excellent, held out of S by one finding

Tier A power supplies — each row lists the unit's specification as published by the source linked in that row, and the sourced reason for its placement.
Power supply	Wattages	Standard	Efficiency	Warranty	At 24/7 idle load	Why it is here	Sources
Seasonic Vertex GX (ATX 3.1)	750–1200W	ATX 3.112V-2x6	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Goldnoise A-	12 yr	no published low-load data	Hardware Busters called the Vertex GX-1200 reliable and class-leadingly quiet — the reviewer runs them on his own test benches — while noting CWT-based rivals score 2–4% higher on raw performance and that it costs more. The ATX 3.1 refresh extended the warranty to 12 years, the longest in this table.	spec · review
Corsair HXi (2025, ATX 3.1)	1000–1500W	ATX 3.112V-2x6 cables (2×8-pin feed)	80 PLUS PlatinumCybenetics Platinumnoise A+	10 yr	Above 70% at 2% load (~24W on the 1200W unit) per Hardware Busters; low standby draw	Hardware Busters found the HX1200i (CWT semi-digital) tightly regulated, silent, and full-power-capable at 47C, with iCUE monitoring and per-rail OCP control. Held out of S for a transient response and light-load efficiency that trail the very best at this price. Worth knowing rather than holding against it: there is no native 12V-2x6 header — the 600W GPU cable feeds from two 8-pin sockets, an arrangement the reviewer considers safer.	spec · review
Super Flower Leadex VII (XG / PRO)	750–1300W	ATX 3.116-pin cable (8+8-pin feed)	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Platinumnoise A-	10 yr	Below 70% at 2% load (~17W) and elevated vampire power (Hardware Busters, PRO 850W) — a gaming-first unit	Hardware Busters names the Leadex VII XG the best-performing 850W unit in its category and rated the PRO’s load regulation superb, on Super Flower’s in-house platform. Docked from S here for the homelab dimension: measured under 70% at a 2% load, high standby draw, and a weak 5VSB rail — plus sky-high inrush current and no native 12V-2x6 header.	spec · review
be quiet! Straight Power 12	750–1500W	ATX 3.112V-2x6	80 PLUS Platinum	10 yr	no published low-load data	XDA Developers rated the 750W unit 9/10 as a solid high-end pick for current AMD, Intel and NVIDIA hardware, with price the main drawback. Platinum-class, 135mm Silent Wings fan, and the current pages carry native 12V-2x6. We found no published light-load measurements for it, so its homelab standing is unproven.	spec · review
Corsair SF Platinum (2024, SFX)SFX	750–1000W	ATX 3.112V-2x6	80 PLUS PlatinumCybenetics Platinum	7 yr	75.7% at 20W, 0.047W standby (Cybenetics, SF750)	KitGuru rated the SF850 9/10 Must Have — high-quality power and stellar build on a Great Wall platform — making this the default SFX answer. Cybenetics measured the SF750 at 75.7% even at a 20W load, strong for a small-form-factor unit. The 7-year warranty (vs 10+ elsewhere) keeps it out of Tier S under our criteria.	spec · review
XPG Core Reactor II	650–1200W	ATX 3.112V-2x6 (current SKU)	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Platinum	10 yr	71.5% at a 17W (2%) load, 0.040W standby (Cybenetics, 850W)	Tech4Gamers scored the 1200W unit 9.3/10 Recommended as an excellent performance-per-dollar choice on CWT’s upgraded CSZ platform, and Cybenetics measured the 850W at 71.5% down at a 17W (2%) load. Launched as ATX 3.0/12VHPWR; current pages state ATX 3.1 with 12V-2x6.	spec · review

Tier B — good, with a caveat worth knowing

Tier B power supplies — each row lists the unit's specification as published by the source linked in that row, and the sourced reason for its placement.
Power supply	Wattages	Standard	Efficiency	Warranty	At 24/7 idle load	Why it is here	Sources
Seasonic Focus GX (ATX 3.1, V4)	750–1000W	ATX 3.112V-2x6	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Platinumnoise A-	10 yr	Above 70% at 2% load, but the reviewer called light-load efficiency unsatisfying (Hardware Busters)	The internet’s reflex recommendation now tests mid-pack: Hardware Busters found the GX-850 V4 well built with Cybenetics Platinum efficiency, but concluded the NZXT C850, Corsair RM850x and Leadex VII XG all outperform it, and criticized an aggressive fan profile and a high launch price. Still a sound in-house Seasonic platform with a 10-year warranty.	spec · review
Corsair RMe (ATX 3.1)	750–1200W	ATX 3.112V-2x6	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Platinumnoise A-	7 yr	69.6% at 20W, 0.049W standby (Cybenetics, 115V) — weak for an always-on box; 89.3% at 100W in KitGuru's 240V testing	KitGuru rated the RM850e (2025, HEC platform) 8/10 Worth Buying — a decent mid-range performer for RTX 5070 Ti-class builds. It gives up measurable ground and three warranty years to its RMx sibling, and Cybenetics measured it at just 69.6% at a 20W load — the weakest 20W result among the tiered units here, and well off its own RMx sibling’s 77.2%.	spec · review
MSI MPG A850G / A1000G PCIE5	850–1000W	ATX 3.112V-2x6 600W	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Goldnoise Standard++	10 yr	Strong at light and super-light loads per Hardware Busters (exact figures unpublished)	Hardware Busters found the A1000G (CWT CSZ) fairly priced and genuinely ATX 3.1-compliant with a true 12V-2x6 header and strong light-load efficiency, but trailing same-platform rivals like the Toughpower GF3 and Core Reactor II on ripple suppression.	spec · review
MSI MAG A750GLS PCIE5	650–1000W	ATX 3.116-pin 450W	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Platinumnoise A	—	High efficiency across all load ranges including light loads (Hardware Busters)	Hardware Busters says the A750GLS (Huntkey-built at 650/750W) fixes the A-GL line’s noise problem and takes the performance lead from the Corsair RM750e at an affordable price, measuring Cybenetics Platinum efficiency with an A noise rating. Held at B only because no source we found states its warranty — an odd omission MSI should fix, and the one thing standing between this unit and Tier A. If you want the best cheap Gold unit here, buy this over its older A850GL stablemate.	spec · review
Thermaltake Toughpower GF3	850–1000W	ATX 3.012VHPWR 600W	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Goldnoise Standard+	10 yr	Highly efficient at light and super-light loads; sub-20 dBA up to 540W (Hardware Busters)	Hardware Busters rated the GF3 1000W (CWT CSZ) a decent ATX 3.0 unit with high build quality that shines at light and super-light loads and stays under 20 dBA up to 540W — but it gets loud beyond that (Cybenetics Standard+) and does not beat the RM1000x. Note a documented cable discrepancy: the review reports Thermaltake documentation putting the bundled 16-pin cable at 450W while the reviewer measured its sense pins configured for 600W. Thermaltake’s current product page states 600W.	spec · review
Thermaltake Toughpower GF A3	750–850W	ATX 3.112V-2x6 450W	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Platinumnoise A-	10 yr	Below 70% at 2% load (~17W); good at normal light loads (Hardware Busters)	Hardware Busters called the GF A3 850W (HKC-built sample) a worth-considering budget unit: Cybenetics Platinum efficiency and roughly 7 dBA quieter on average than the same-priced MSI MAG A850GL. Its flags: high inrush current, both EPS connectors sharing one cable, and under 70% efficiency at a 2% load.	spec · review
Cooler Master GX III Gold	750–1250W	ATX 3.112V-2x6 600W (3.1 SKU)	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Platinumnoise Standard++	10 yr	High efficiency in all load ranges incl. light loads (Hardware Busters); CM claims Titanium-level light-load efficiency at 115V	Hardware Busters found the Lite-On-built GX III 850W efficient across all load ranges with a great APFC, but not competitive at the $170 it carried at review time, with weak ATX 3.x transient response and a fan the reviewer doubted would outlast the 10-year warranty. Cooler Master now sells a separate ATX 3.1 SKU with a native 90-degree 12V-2x6.	spec · review
Cooler Master V850 Gold i	750–850W	ATX 3.012VHPWR 450W	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Platinumnoise Standard++	10 yr	High efficiency on all load ranges incl. super-light loads (Hardware Busters)	Hardware Busters rated the Chicony-built V850i high-performance and high-build-quality with high efficiency at every load range, but called its $185 review-time price stiff against $100–165 rivals and the ‘semi-digital’ branding overstated (only fan control and monitoring are digital).	review
MSI MAG A750GL / A850GL PCIE5	750–850W	ATX 3.016-pin 450W (marked 600W)	80 PLUS Gold	—	Below 70% at 2% load (~17W); platform needs boosting at light loads (Hardware Busters)	Hardware Busters called the A850GL (CWT GPX) decent, compact and well-priced with good ripple suppression — but noisy even at light loads, under 70% efficient at a 2% load, and shipping a 16-pin cable marked 600W that is actually configured for 450W. Warranty is contested (5 years per the review’s spec table, 10 in current retail titles; MSI’s own datasheet omits it), so we print neither.	spec · review
be quiet! Pure Power 12 M	550–1000W	ATX 3.012VHPWR 600W	80 PLUS Gold	10 yr	74.9% at 20W, 81.8% at 40W, 86.3% at 60W (Club386); Cybenetics: 77.0% at 20W at 230V	Club386 concluded the HEC-built 1000W unit performs like a Dark Power in all but name, and its measured 74.9% at a 20W load is one of the better low-load results here — a quiet, homelab-friendly pick from the ATX 3.0/12VHPWR generation, backed by 10 years.	spec · review
Super Flower Leadex III Gold (ATX 3.1)	650–1300W	ATX 3.112V-2x6 on 1000W+ (unconfirmed at 850W)	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Gold	10 yr	no published low-load data	Vortez gave the 850W GOLD UP an award as the cheapest route into ATX 3.1/PCIe 5.1 at its $139.99 launch price, on Super Flower’s in-house platform with a 10-year warranty. Check the exact SKU before buying: Super Flower’s own catalog page states the native 12V-2x6 cable applies to the 1000W and 1300W models only, and we could not confirm from either source whether the 850W SKU bundles one.	spec · review
Montech Century II Gold	550–1200W	ATX 3.112V-2x6	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Goldnoise 26.9 dBA avg	10 yr	Passable but not exceptional at very low loads (Tom's Hardware, 1050W)	The budget pick that punches up: Tom’s Hardware gave the 1050W an Editor’s Choice for solid electrical performance at a modest price, and Cybenetics’ own report on the 850W measured ETA Gold with a 26.9 dBA average. Tom’s cautions: a single 12V-2x6, and a young OEM (XWY, founded by ex-HKC engineers). Note Montech’s marketing says Platinum; Cybenetics’ report says Gold — we print the report.	spec · review

Tier C — budget class, fine when right-sized

Tier C power supplies — each row lists the unit's specification as published by the source linked in that row, and the sourced reason for its placement.
Power supply	Wattages	Standard	Efficiency	Warranty	At 24/7 idle load	Why it is here	Sources
XPG Core Reactor II VE	650–850W	ATX 3.112V-2x6	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Gold	7 yr	72.6% at a 17W (2%) load, 0.016W standby (Cybenetics, 850W)	Tech4Gamers scored the CWT-built Value Edition 8.9/10 as a solid affordable pick performing above its Gold badge. It trades three warranty years (7 vs 10) and some refinement against the non-VE — and posts the lowest measured standby draw of any unit here (0.016W). A strong C, and a genuinely good cheap always-on unit.	spec · review
DeepCool PN750D / PN850D	750–850W	ATX 3.112V-2x6 600W	80 PLUS GoldCybenetics Goldnoise Standard++	10 yr	Below 70% at 2% load; inefficient 5VSB rail (Hardware Busters)	Hardware Busters found the PN850D (CWT GPW budget platform) ATX 3.1-ready with tight load regulation, full power at 47C and a 10-year warranty — but non-modular, louder than 33 dBA on average, under 70% at a 2% load, and at its $90 review-time price too close to better units.	spec · review
Thermaltake Smart BM3 Bronze	550–850W	ATX 3.112V-2x6 300W	80 PLUS Bronze	5 yr	no published low-load data	eTeknix found the BM3 850W hit a sweet spot for a decent gaming PC — semi-modular, compact, cool and quiet, with mid-load efficiency measuring at Silver-to-Gold levels despite the Bronze badge. Its 16-pin tops out at 300W, so pair it with mid-range cards only.	spec · review
Corsair CX750 (2023, non-modular)	550–750W	—	80 PLUS Bronze	5 yr	no published low-load data	PC Guide rates the current non-modular CX750 4/5 as a strong budget choice at the right price, at the cost of efficiency and modularity. No page we found states an ATX 3.x claim or a 16-pin connector for this SKU, so treat it as a classic 8-pin-era budget unit; Corsair’s newer CX-M (2025) refresh is the ATX 3.1 semi-modular sibling.	spec · review
MSI MAG A750BN PCIE5	750W	ATX 2.412VHPWR 300W (fixed cable)	80 PLUS Bronze	—	Gold-level efficiency below ~50% load, dropping to Bronze at high loads (LTT Labs)	Do not let the PCIE5 branding fool you: LTT Labs’ lab test identifies this as an ATX 2.4 unit with a permanently attached 300W 12VHPWR cable and no UVP protection — though it passed their testing and measured Gold-level efficiency below half load. A fine strictly-budget choice if you understand exactly what it is.	spec · review
EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 GT	650–1000W	—4×6+2 PCIe (12VHPWR adapter included)	80 PLUS Gold	10 yr	no published low-load data	The one row here with no independent lab test — no major outlet published one for the GT line — so it rests on first-party experience: we ran one under an RTX 5080 build for an extended period and rated it 4.3/5. Specifications come from EVGA’s launch announcement rather than a live product page, since evga.com no longer serves them. EVGA’s wind-down also means the nominal 10-year warranty may have no service behind it. Clearance or used pricing only, valued as a zero-warranty unit.	our review

A row's review link goes to the test the placement leans on; spec goes to the manufacturer page behind the wattage, standard and warranty figures. Where a manufacturer page was unreachable, the review is the source for both and no spec link appears. Cells we could not source are left blank — blank beats guessed.

Avoid — documented problems, not vibes

Gigabyte GP-P750GM / GP-P850GM

Documented catastrophic-failure pattern: over-power protection set at 120-150% of rating, a sample that exploded during Tom's Hardware testing, and — as reported in that same Tom's Hardware coverage of GamersNexus' investigation — half of a ten-unit GamersNexus sample failing. A revised version exists (new PCB, OPP lowered), but revised stock is externally indistinguishable from pre-fix stock — Tom's Hardware advises against buying unless the production batch is certain.

Documented by: Tom's Hardware (expert response) · Tom's Hardware (revised-unit review)

No-name case-bundled units (exemplar: Equites T500)

Teardown coverage documented a decorative iron block adding fake weight, no input protections including OCP, and a real capability estimated at roughly half the labeled 500W. The class is still sold bundled inside ultra-cheap cases. Buy only safety-certified units from brands that appear in professional test databases.

Documented by: Tom's Hardware · PC Gamer (via Yahoo syndication)

How to read it

Tiers rank quality, not size. A Tier S 750W unit is not “better” for your build than a Tier B 1000W unit if your build needs 1000W. Size first — our PSU wattage calculator does the arithmetic from your actual parts, and our sizing guides for the RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 walk the GPU-specific cases. Then use this table to pick the best unit at that wattage.
Standard and connector matter more than they used to. ATX 3.1 with a native 12V-2x6 is the current target for a modern GPU build. 12VHPWR-era units still work — the connector revision improved contact reliability margins, not compatibility. Watch the cable ratings printed in the rows, because the marking and the wiring do not always agree: Hardware Busters found MSI’s MAG A850GL shipping a 16-pin cable marked 600W whose sense pins were configured for 450W, and found the opposite on Thermaltake’s GF3 1000W, where the documented 450W figure sat against a cable the reviewer measured as configured for 600W. Trust a measured review over a printed number.
Warranty is a quality signal. The industry’s best platforms carry 10–12 years because their makers expect them to survive it. A blank warranty cell means none of that unit’s sources stated one — which is itself worth knowing.
Efficiency badges are a floor, not a curve. The certification column describes a unit at its tested load points, which start at 20% for every 80 PLUS level below Titanium. It tells you nothing about the loads an idle machine spends its life at — which is the next section.

If a unit you own is misbehaving — random restarts, black screens under load, coil whine that changed character — the tier list will not diagnose it; our PSU failure symptoms guide walks the actual triage.

The 24/7 homelab dimension nobody’s tier list covers

Here is the gap in every PSU badge on every box. The 80 PLUS program publishes minimum efficiency thresholds at 20%, 50% and 100% of rated load for every level; only Titanium publishes a minimum at 10% load, per Bel Fuse’s published threshold tables. Below the tested points the certification says nothing about how a unit behaves. Intel’s ATX v3 design guide addresses this directly, adding a low-load point at 10W (or 2% of capacity on units above 500W) that requires 60% efficiency and recommends 70% — the guide’s stated reasoning being that desktop idle power has fallen so far since 2005 that power-supply loss now dominates what an idle machine pulls from the wall.

Now put that next to what always-on hardware actually draws. ServeTheHome measured a Minisforum MS-02 Ultra at 19W idle at the wall and a ZimaCube 2 Pro at 25–30W; a typical N100 mini PC runs single digits to low teens. A homelab box spends the overwhelming majority of its hours at exactly the loads the badge never measured.

The measured numbers make the point better than the argument does. Cybenetics publishes full light-load tables for the units it certifies, and down at a genuine idle load, current Gold-and-above 750–1000W units span 68% to 78%:

Unit	Load	Efficiency	Standby draw
be quiet! Pure Power 12 M 1000W	20W	77.8%	0.055W
Corsair RM850x (2024)	20W	77.2%	0.018W
Corsair SF750 Platinum (2024)	20W	75.7%	0.047W
Seasonic Focus GX-750 (ATX 3.1)	20W	74.5%	0.064W
be quiet! Dark Power 13 1000W	20W	74.5%	0.068W
FSP Hydro Ti Pro 1000W	20W (2%)	74.1%	0.076W
XPG Core Reactor II VE 850W	17W (2%)	72.6%	0.016W
MSI MAG A850GL 850W	20W	72.1%	0.055W
XPG Core Reactor II 850W	17W (2%)	71.5%	0.040W
Corsair RM850e	20W	69.6%	0.049W
FSP Hydro G Pro 1000W	20W (2%)	68.0%	0.071W

All figures at 115V, from each unit’s Cybenetics evaluation report (every report linked in Sources). The load column states the exact point measured: Cybenetics’ low-load row is 2% of rated capacity on units above 500W — 20W on a 1000W unit, 17W on an 850W one — and its light-load table also publishes a fixed 20W point. This list covers the units with published Cybenetics light-load data, which is not the same set as the tier table above; the FSP Hydro G Pro is here for the measurement, not as a tiered recommendation.

Two practical conclusions fall out of this table.

Right-size an always-on box even harder than a gaming PC. Fifty watts on a 1000W unit is a 5% load — below every point the badge tested, and near the bottom of every curve above. The same 50W on a smaller quality unit sits meaningfully higher up its curve. Four families in the table reach down to 550W — the Pure Power 12 M, Century II Gold, Smart BM3 and CX750 — and our wattage calculator will tell you whether your parts list fits one. Resist the instinct to buy double.

When the box runs 24/7, pick from the top of the low-load column. The spread above is real but modest — at a 30W idle, the gap between the best and worst rows works out to a handful of watts at the wall. What makes it worth acting on is that an always-on node multiplies those watts by 8,760 hours a year, across every node you run, and the same units that measure well down here tend to be the quieter, better-built ones anyway. Our 24/7 homelab idle power costs breakdown has the measured draws and annual math for the hardware itself; the power cost calculator turns your own wattage and electricity rate into a yearly figure. And if the box matters enough to run 24/7, it matters enough to put behind a properly sized UPS.

One honest boundary: for a gaming desktop that idles a few hours a day, none of this moves your bill meaningfully; a few watts across a few idle hours is noise. This section exists because homelab duty cycles are the inverse of gaming duty cycles: 90-plus percent idle, every day, forever.

Your PSU is not in this table. Here is how to tier it yourself

The database covers 28 current families, so plenty of perfectly good older units are absent. The method behind every row above is reproducible in about five minutes, using the same public sources:

Find it in the Cybenetics database. Search cybenetics.com for the exact model. A per-unit report gives you measured average efficiency, the light-load table this page leans on, noise in dBA, and standby draw — far more than the badge on the box. No listing at all is itself information: it means no independent lab published full-range numbers.
Read what the platform is, from a review rather than a forum. A hands-on review from an outlet that load-tests will name the OEM platform and how it behaved at temperature. If the only thing you can find is a spec sheet and opinions, treat the unit as untested rather than good.
Check the warranty against the class. Current quality platforms run 10–12 years. A 3–5 year warranty on a modern unit is the manufacturer telling you what it expects.
Check the connector against your card. Confirm the 16-pin cable’s actual rating, not its marking — two units in this table have a mismatch between the two.

If it clears all four, it belongs somewhere in Tier A or B whether or not we have listed it. If it fails step one and step two, that is the real warning sign — not a missing tier letter.

The questions builders keep asking

Should I be worried about my PSU’s tier?

If your current unit is running a system it is sized for and behaving normally, no. Tier lists earn their keep at purchase time, when the units in a price bracket look identical on the box. An installed, stable, correctly sized unit from a reputable maker does not become risky because a spreadsheet ranks something else higher.

Is a lower-tier PSU dangerous with a high-end GPU?

Tier C in this table means compromised, not dangerous. Every C row rests on a test — an outlet’s, or in the single flagged case above, ours — and where a protection is missing, the row says so outright: the MSI MAG A750BN’s entry records that LTT Labs found no under-voltage protection, which is the kind of detail you want printed rather than smoothed over. What deserves genuine caution is the Avoid class, where the failures are documented rather than theoretical, and mismatched sizing: a 300W-rated 16-pin cable feeding a 350W card is a real problem no tier letter fixes. Check the connector column, then check your wattage math.

Should I replace a working eight-year-old power supply?

Not on age alone, but the calculus shifts once a unit is well past its warranty. Capacitors degrade with heat and hours, and an old supply that was sized for the card you had in 2018 is often genuinely undersized for a modern one — which is the condition that stresses it hardest. If it is out of warranty, feeding a much bigger GPU than it was bought for, or showing any of the failure symptoms, replace it proactively rather than after it takes something with it. If it is comfortably sized and behaving, leave it alone.

What is deliberately not here

Seasonic Vertex PX, Super Flower Leadex VII Platinum PRO — manufacturer specs verified, but we found no independent lab test of those specific lines. Spec-sheet-only rows do not get tier letters here.
Seasonic Prime TX and be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 — these now exist only at 1300W and above, a halo class this table does not cover. Both are well-regarded; neither is a mainstream buy.
Montech Century G5 — gone from Montech’s own catalog with no professional review we could find; its successor Century II Gold is in the table instead.
Whole brands, and this is scope rather than judgment — Thermalright, Lian Li, ASUS, Gigabyte’s current lines, Antec, SilverStone and Phanteks are absent because v1.0 research covered the vendors above, not because their units were assessed and rejected. They are first in line for the next revision.
Successor lines we saw but did not verify — be quiet! Dark Power 14 and Pure Power 13 M, MSI’s GS-suffix refreshes beyond the A750GLS, FSP’s ATX 3.1 Hydro refreshes. They join the table when a verifiable test exists; that is what a living database means.
OEM folklore — platform attributions you may have seen elsewhere for units whose linked reviews do not state one.

Revision 1.0 — published 2026-07-29, 28 units. Next scheduled review: October 2026. Corrections and additions are welcome at hello@techfuelhq.com — bring a source and we will check it against the same standard we held ourselves to. The underlying dataset is downloadable as open JSON under CC BY 4.0, and it carries the same revision stamp, so you can diff it against any later version.

Sources

Certification and specification primaries: Intel ATX Version 3 Multi Rail PSU Design Guide, doc 336521 · CLEAResult 80 PLUS program details · Bel Fuse 80 PLUS threshold tables · Cybenetics ETA methodology · Corsair 80 PLUS vs Cybenetics explainer

Low-load measurements: Cybenetics evaluation reports for the Corsair RM850x, Corsair RM850e, Corsair SF750, Seasonic Focus GX-750, MSI MAG A850GL, be quiet! Pure Power 12 M, be quiet! Dark Power 13, FSP Hydro G Pro, FSP Hydro Ti Pro, XPG Core Reactor II, and XPG Core Reactor II VE

Homelab idle draw: ServeTheHome — Minisforum MS-02 Ultra power consumption · ServeTheHome — ZimaCube 2 Pro power consumption · HomeLab Starter power consumption guide · XDA on PSU oversizing and the efficiency curve

Per-unit review and specification sources are linked directly in each table row.

5800X3D vs 9800X3D: Should You Upgrade in 2026?

LK Wood IV — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-25 · Updated 2026-07-25 · ~12 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · Two things almost every comparison gets wrong

The 5800X3D is not discontinued. AMD relaunched it as a 10th Anniversary Edition in June 2026 at $349. It sells new today.
The "42% faster" number is a 720p figure. At 1080p, two reputable sites disagree by 2× (+17.9% vs +38.5%). At 4K it is +2.1%.
It is not a CPU swap. AM4 → AM5 needs a new board and DDR5: ≈$1,020–$1,090 at today's prices, where a 32GB RAM kit costs about as much as the CPU.
Upgrade if you play what upgraders commonly report as CPU-bound cases — MMO raids, sim racing grids, 4X/strategy, 240Hz shooters — or chase 1% lows at high-refresh 1440p.
Don't if you play GPU-bound AAA games at native 4K. Put the money in a GPU instead — TechPowerUp says the same thing.

All prices verified on Amazon US 2026-07-25. Benchmark figures are from RTX 4090-class test benches, which makes them ceilings.

Correction first: the 5800X3D is not discontinued

The most-asked question about this chip is “why is the 5800X3D discontinued?” — it shows up in Google’s People Also Ask box for practically every related search. The premise is out of date.

AMD did retire the part, and for a stretch it was genuinely hard to buy new. Then it brought it back: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition for Socket AM4. AMD’s own Computex 2026 post states it directly — “The Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition will be available beginning June 25, with a suggested etail price of US $349 at launch” (AMD). It is the same 2022 silicon, not a redesign, and the boxed part sells new today: $346.81 on Amazon US from AMD’s own storefront (checked 2026-07-25).

That matters for your decision in a way the spec sheets miss: the platform you are being told to leave is one AMD just restocked. If your 5800X3D dies, you can replace it. If a friend wants your old parts, they are worth something. AM4 is in legacy status — in that same post AMD writes “we are extending support for the Socket AM5 platform through 2029” while speaking of AM4’s support in the past tense — but legacy is not dead.

The gap depends entirely on resolution

Here is the single most important table in this article. TechPowerUp publishes a full resolution sweep with both chips — the one cited here — all on an RTX 4090 at highest quality settings (review dated 2024-11-06):

Resolution	5800X3D (relative)	9800X3D	9800X3D advantage
720p	77.5%	100%	+29.0%
1080p	84.8%	100%	+17.9%
1440p	91.7%	100%	+9.1%
4K	97.9%	100%	+2.1%

Source: TechPowerUp performance summary (relative-performance charts per resolution) and the direct 5800X3D head-to-head.

The gap shrinks sharply as resolution rises and effectively vanishes at 4K. TechPowerUp says so itself in its conclusion: “At the highly GPU-bound 4K scenario, even with an RTX 4090, the differences between the top processors are minimal… it might make sense to opt for a more affordable CPU and spend the savings on a faster graphics card, where you are getting more FPS for your money.”

About that “42% faster” number

You will see ~42% quoted constantly. Be precise about where it comes from: it is ComputerBase’s number, not TechPowerUp’s, and it is a 720p result. ComputerBase’s 15-game frametime (1% percentile) rating puts the 9800X3D at 103.76 against the 5800X3D’s 72.77 — +42.6% — and the site states plainly that its CPU test course runs at 720p on an RTX 4090 specifically to isolate the processor (ComputerBase).

That is a legitimate measurement of CPU capability at a resolution nobody plays at. It is not a prediction of what you will see, and it is not comparable to TechPowerUp’s +29.0% at the same 720p — different game sets and memory configurations produce different answers, which is the whole point of this section.

Worse for anyone hoping for one clean number: two reputable outlets disagree by roughly 2× at the same resolution. TechPowerUp measured +17.9% at 1080p. TechSpot/Hardware Unboxed, testing on the same GPU class and publishing the same day, measured 205 fps vs 148 fps — +38.5% across a 14-game average (TechSpot).

Neither is wrong. They picked different games and different settings, and in CPU testing that choice is the result. The honest takeaway is a range, not a number — and where you land inside it depends on what you play.

One more framing point that applies to every figure here: all of them come from RTX 4090-class benches. Those are ceilings. On many mid-range setups you will sit closer to the 4K column than the 1080p one — unless your games or settings are genuinely CPU-bound, which is the exception this article spends the next section on.

Where the upgrade actually pays: 1% lows and specific genres

Average FPS is the wrong metric for this decision. The upgraders who report being happy almost always cite frame-time consistency, and the data supports them: in TechPowerUp’s run the 1080p 1% lows go 120.2 → 145.1 FPS (+20.7%) — wider than that same review’s +17.9% average-FPS gain (minimum-FPS chart, 1080p). At 4K the same measure moves 75.7 → 77.8 FPS, +2.8%, which is noise — and notably the 9800X3D’s 4K 1% low sits below the 7800X3D’s there, i.e. the top chips are within noise of one another.

The other half of the answer is genre, and this is where review suites mislead. Benchmark sets lean on graphically heavy AAA titles; the CPU-bound genres get left out. Self-hosting and gaming communities consistently name the same list of “yes, upgrade” cases — treat these as community sentiment rather than measurements:

MMO raid content (World of Warcraft is the most-cited example) — effectively unbounded CPU demand in dense raids.
Escape from Tarkov, especially the worst-case maps.
Sim racing with full grids — the delta appears at race starts, not hotlapping. Caveat from the sim crowd itself: triple 1440p is ~11 million pixels versus ~8 million for one 4K panel, so a triple-screen rig can be as GPU-bound as a 4K gamer.
4X and grand strategy, dense AI-driven city builders, and faster shader compilation.
Competitive shooters at 240Hz+ where you are chasing frame-time floors.

The upscaling wrinkle that breaks the simple 4K rule

“4K means GPU-bound, so don’t upgrade” is a good rule with a real hole in it, and it is the sharpest point upgraders raise: many players are not rendering at native 4K. DLSS and FSR render internally at a lower resolution and upscale, which pushes work back onto the CPU. Add frame generation and heavy ray tracing and the CPU matters more again.

So the sharper version of the rule: native 1440p or 4K on a GPU-bound AAA title — stay put. Upscaling plus frame generation plus heavy RT plus fast asset streaming — the platform starts to matter.

The five-minute test that beats any benchmark chart

Do not buy from a chart. Run the games you actually play and watch GPU utilisation. This is a rough heuristic upgraders use, not a benchmark — but it is measured on your hardware, which no review can be:

GPU pinned at 95–100% → the GPU is your limit. A CPU upgrade buys you very little. Spend on the graphics card.
GPU sitting around 60–70% while you miss your monitor’s refresh → the CPU is holding you back, and this upgrade is aimed at exactly your problem.

That symptom is what upgraders describe as the thing that finally convinced them, and it costs nothing to check.

The part nobody prices: this is a platform migration

Everyone calls it a CPU upgrade. It is not. AM4 and AM5 are different sockets with different memory, so the 9800X3D needs a new motherboard and new DDR5. Priced from live Amazon US listings on 2026-07-25, new standalone parts only:

Part	Example	Price
CPU	Ryzen 7 9800X3D	$444.99
Motherboard	MSI MAG B650 Tomahawk WiFi	$175.99
Memory	32GB DDR5-6000 kit	$400 – $470
Total		≈$1,020 – $1,090

Read that memory row again. A 32GB memory kit now costs about as much as the CPU.

The band in that table is the mainstream one our DDR5 price guide verified a day earlier: about $400 for the cheapest in-stock DDR5-6000 kit, and $420–$470 for CL30-class kits from Lexar, Patriot, G.Skill’s Flare X5 and Corsair’s Vengeance line.

Brand tier matters more than usual right now, and it is worth knowing before you shop. Checking on 2026-07-25, every G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo kit at DDR5-6000 CL30 listed at $599.99 — roughly $130 above a Flare X5 or Vengeance kit at the identical DDR5-6000 CL30 spec. Within that same Trident Z5 Neo line, dropping to CL36 fell to $459.99. So the spread you see is a brand-and-binning premium, not a performance difference worth $130: our own DDR5 guide measures CL30 versus CL36 at 1–3% in CPU-bound cases. Buy the spec, not the heatspreader. (Totals are our arithmetic over separately verified prices, not a figure any source quotes.)

For context on how strange 2026 is: a new 5800X3D is $346.81 and a new AM4 B550 board is $99.99. The chip you already own costs less than the memory you would need to replace it.

You will recoup some of it — your 5800X3D, AM4 board and DDR4 kit all have resale value. Note that DDR4 is elevated in 2026 as well: a new 32GB DDR4-3600 kit was $219.99 on the same day we priced everything else, which suggests the memory you displace is worth more than it would be in a normal market. We have not verified secondhand prices, so we are not quoting you a resale number; check completed listings for your exact parts.

For the wider picture of what components cost right now, our verified 2026 PC part prices page tracks the same dataset these figures come from, with a last-verified date on every row.

So: upgrade, or not?

Stay on the 5800X3D if you play GPU-bound AAA games at native 1440p or 4K, your GPU already sits near 100% utilisation, or that ~$1,020–$1,090 would otherwise go toward a graphics card. TechPowerUp’s own advice points the same way. AMD relaunching the chip means staying put is a supported position, not a stubborn one.

Upgrade if your games are CPU-bound — MMO raids, sim racing grids, strategy simulations, 240Hz competitive shooters — or if you have watched GPU utilisation hover at 60–70% while missing your refresh rate. Buy it for the 1% lows, not the average FPS.

Wait if the memory price is what is stopping you. DDR5 at roughly $400–$470 for 32GB is the binding constraint in this decision, not the CPU, and it is the one variable that could move meaningfully — our DDR5 price guide tracks where that market actually sits.

Already on AM5 and asking a narrower version of this question? The 7800X3D vs 9800X3D upgrade case is a different calculation entirely, because there is no platform cost — just the chip. And if you are weighing the 9800X3D against its bigger sibling for mixed gaming and production work, 9950X3D vs 9800X3D covers that split.

7800X3D vs 9800X3D: should you upgrade? — the same question without the platform cost
9950X3D vs 9800X3D for gaming — when more cores actually help
Ryzen 7 7800X3D review — the middle generation, measured
9800X3D undervolt guide — if you do upgrade, tune it
Verified 2026 PC part prices — the dataset behind the cost table, with per-part verification dates

Sources

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/27.html — relative-performance summary per resolution (RTX 4090, 2024-11-06)
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/29.html — direct 9800X3D vs 5800X3D head-to-head
https://tpucdn.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/images/minimum-fps-1920-1080.png — 1080p minimum-FPS (1% low) chart
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/5.html — test methodology and bench configuration
https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/prozessoren/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-test.90151/seite-2 — 15-game 720p frametime rating, source of the widely quoted ~42% figure
https://www.techspot.com/review/2915-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/ — 14-game 1080p average (RTX 4090, 2024-11-06)
https://www.amd.com/en/blogs/2026/amd-computex-2026-10-years-of-am4-am5-support-through.html — AMD Computex 2026: 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition ($349, June 25) and AM5 support through 2029
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/desktops/ryzen/5000-series/amd-ryzen-7-5800x3d.html — official 5800X3D product page
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/ — full review index

Prices were fetched from live Amazon US listings on 2026-07-25 (new, standalone, exact-model listings only; combo and renewed listings rejected). Memory pricing in particular moves week to week during the ongoing DRAM shortage — treat every figure here as a dated snapshot, not a quote, and check the current price before you buy. This article contains no affiliate or retailer links. Community observations — the genre list, the upscaling counter-argument and the GPU-utilisation test — come from public upgrade threads on r/buildapc, r/AMDHelp and the Overclockers UK forums; each is user-reported experience, not a measurement we made, and is labelled as such above.

Self-Hosted Read-It-Later Apps: Life After Pocket (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-25 · Updated 2026-07-25 · ~11 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · Decide whether you want to read or to organize

Pocket is gone — shut down 2025-07-08, data deleted from 2025-11-12 (not the October 8 date most write-ups repeat).
The export was URLs only. Mozilla's CSV did not contain your article text, so no migration carries your saved reading across.
Want to read? Readeck (0.22.3, AGPL-3.0) or wallabag (2.6.14, MIT) — both extract and store the readable article.
Want to organize links? linkding (1.45.0, MIT — one container on SQLite) or Shiori (1.8.0, MIT, single Go binary).
Want archive-everything at scale? That is the bookmark-manager end — see Karakeep vs Linkwarden.

Versions checked 2026-07-25 against each project's release API. Check the changelog before copying a compose file.

What actually happened to Pocket

Mozilla announced the phase-out on 2025-05-22, writing that it had “made the difficult decision to phase out two products: Pocket, our read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot” (Mozilla). The service shut down on 2025-07-08 and dropped into export-only mode.

Here is the part almost every write-up gets wrong. The original announcement said data would be deleted after October 8, 2025, and that date is what got copied across the internet. It was superseded. Mozilla’s own support article states plainly: “As of November 12, 2025, user data export has been disabled, and all user data has been queued for permanent deletion” — the same date the Pocket API was switched off (Mozilla Support, via Internet Archive). If you are reading this in 2026 wondering whether your list is still recoverable: it is not.

Two details matter more than the dates, because they shape what a replacement can actually do for you:

The export was a CSV of links. Mozilla’s instructions told users to click “Export CSV file” at getpocket.com/export, and the support article is explicit that the file contains the URLs of saved items rather than the article text (Mozilla Support, via Internet Archive). Ten years of saved reading came back as a spreadsheet of addresses.

Every official escape route was another cloud. Mozilla published a list of “third-party services that we understand support the import of Pocket data” — GoodLinks, Futurwise, Instapaper, Matter, Raindrop.io and Readwise — while explicitly stating it had not vetted them (Mozilla Support, via Internet Archive). Every one is hosted. Not a single self-hosted option appeared — which is the whole reason this page exists.

Read-it-later or bookmark manager? Answer this first

Most “Pocket alternative” lists quietly mix two different products, and it is the single biggest source of disappointment when people migrate.

A read-it-later app is built around consuming an article. It extracts the readable text, strips navigation and ads, and gives you a reader view — the thing Pocket actually was.
A bookmark manager is built around organizing and preserving links, usually with a full-page snapshot so the page survives link rot. Excellent at recall; not necessarily a nice place to read.

Self-hosting threads keep re-litigating this, with people pointing out that a given “Pocket alternatives” roundup is mostly bookmark managers, and others arriving at the same conclusion after trying half a dozen tools. If your goal is “I want to read these six articles on the couch tonight,” a bookmark manager will technically store them and still leave you unsatisfied.

This page covers the reading end, plus the lightweight link-organizers people most often reach for as Pocket replacements — some of which describe themselves as bookmark managers, and are included here precisely because that overlap is where the confusion lives. What this page does not try to settle is heavyweight archival at scale: the two strongest options there get a dedicated head-to-head in Karakeep vs Linkwarden, which resolves the organize-versus-archive split within that category.

The tools, by the job they do

Readeck — the closest thing to “Pocket, self-hosted”

Readeck describes itself as an app that “lets you save the precious readable content of web pages you like and want to keep forever” (Readeck on Codeberg). That framing is the point: it is a reader first, an archive second.

Current stable is 0.22.3, released 2026-04-16, under AGPL-3.0, with the repository actively updated as of this writing (verified via the Codeberg API on 2026-07-25). It is the tool that comes up most often in self-hosting threads as the recommendation over the heavier options, usually on resource-efficiency grounds — though that is community sentiment, not a benchmark.

wallabag — the veteran, and the one with real export

wallabag is the veteran option here. It is explicitly a content-extraction app — its README describes saving a web page and keeping only readable content, built on the Graby and php-readability extraction stack (wallabag README).

Current stable is 2.6.14, released 2025-10-07, under the MIT license, with commits on the default branch as recently as 2026-07-24. It is a PHP application requiring PHP 7.4+ and a PDO database — SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB, or PostgreSQL (requirements) — and the documented Docker quick-start runs on SQLite (installation).

Two things wallabag has that most of this field does not: in-article annotations and highlights (annotations docs), and per-article export to ePUB, PDF, XML, JSON and CSV, including exporting a whole category at once (download docs). If you want saved articles on an e-reader, that is the feature to look at. It also ships first-party Android and iOS apps plus the wallabagger browser extension.

Honest counterweight, from self-hosting threads rather than the docs: wallabag’s initial setup gets criticised for requiring an OAuth client ID and secret on top of a username and password, and one long-time user reported Android sync degrading past roughly fifteen thousand saved articles. Both are single data points, but the scale ceiling is the only concrete one anyone named in this space.

linkding — minimal, fast, and archiving is opt-in

linkding is positioned as a minimal, fast, Docker-first bookmark manager, and it is the tool the community reliably names when someone asks which is snappiest. Current stable is 1.45.0, released 2026-01-06, under the MIT license, on a steady cadence (five stable releases between 2025-08-16 and that date). It is a Django app using SQLite by default, with PostgreSQL optional (no MySQL), and its image runs on ARM including Raspberry Pi.

The detail that surprises people: server-side archiving is not in the base image. HTML snapshots live in the latest-plus variant, which drives singlefile-cli against a headless Chromium, and whose documentation asks for at least 1 GB of RAM to run that Chromium (linkding archiving docs). linkding can also push pages to the Internet Archive instead of storing snapshots locally. So the “linkding is light” reputation applies to the base image — which is not the archiving one.

Shiori — one Go binary, slow and steady

Shiori is a bookmark manager distributed as a single Go binary, usable as a CLI or a web app, and explicitly modelled on Pocket (Shiori README). It does archive page content by default, parsing readable content and storing an offline copy. Current stable is 1.8.0, released 2025-09-26, MIT licensed, with SQLite by default and PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB available.

The honest caveat is velocity: the project’s own FAQ describes it as maintained but slow-moving, with a single primary active maintainer (Shiori FAQ), and the browser extension is self-declared beta. The last stable release is the oldest of the four here — though the default branch had commits as recently as 2026-07-10, so this is a pace-and-bus-factor risk, not an abandoned project.

Footprint and capability, side by side

Versions verified 2026-07-25 from each project’s release API.

	Readeck 0.22.3	wallabag 2.6.14	linkding 1.45.0	Shiori 1.8.0
Primary job	Read saved articles	Read + annotate + export	Organize links fast	Organize links, single binary
License	AGPL-3.0	MIT	MIT	MIT
Latest release	2026-04-16	2025-10-07	2026-01-06	2025-09-26
Stores readable text	Yes	Yes (Graby extraction)	Base image: no; `latest-plus`: HTML snapshot	Yes, offline archive by default
Database	See Readeck docs	SQLite / MySQL / PostgreSQL	SQLite default, PostgreSQL optional	SQLite default, PostgreSQL / MySQL
Notable extra	Reader-first design	ePUB export, annotations	Internet Archive integration, ARM/Pi	CLI + web from one binary
Documented RAM figure	none published	none published	≥1 GB for `latest-plus` (Chromium)	none published

Nobody in this category except linkding publishes a RAM figure, and linkding’s is specifically for the archiving image. Treat any “uses only X MB” claim you read elsewhere as unverified unless it names a version and a workload.

What the Pocket export actually gives you

If you still have a CSV you exported before 2025-11-12, understand what it is before you plan a migration.

It is a list of URLs and metadata. Your new app will re-fetch each page itself — which means the result depends entirely on whether those pages still exist and still serve their content to a server-side fetcher. Pages that died, went behind a paywall, or now require JavaScript in the years since you saved them will not come back. One self-hoster hit exactly this warning while importing into Readeck; another reported a painless import into Karakeep. Both are single data points, and they are not contradictory — the import mechanics differ by tool, but the missing-article-text problem is Pocket’s, not the importer’s.

The lesson generalises past Pocket: a service that only stores your links is one shutdown away from being a list of 404s. That is the argument for running a tool that extracts and stores the article text — Readeck, wallabag, Shiori’s default archive, or linkding in its archiving image — rather than one that keeps only the URL.

Gotchas the project docs don’t mention

These come from self-hosting community threads rather than documentation. Each is one or a few data points — corroborate before betting on them.

Paywalled and JS-heavy pages need the browser, not the server. The recurring workaround is the SingleFile browser extension: your logged-in browser renders the page, then pushes that snapshot into the app. Server-side crawlers get blocked precisely because they are not you. This one is not folklore — linkding documents the SingleFile-to-API upload path directly (linkding archiving docs).
Cookie banners get archived too. They are part of the rendered page, and users report consent overlays dominating captured copies at scale.
Reddit archiving was broken across tools as of June 2026 — one user reported Karakeep, Readeck with SingleFile, Linkwarden and linkding all failing to render post content, with a maintainer replying in the same thread (r/selfhosted). Timestamped deliberately: this is the kind of thing that gets fixed, so re-check before assuming.
“Archived” and “readable offline in the app” are different claims. One Karakeep user found the offline copy existed server-side but was not viewable in the iOS app. Test the phone path specifically.
Resume-reading position is a feature people repeatedly miss. Its absence is cited across separate threads as the reason users abandoned an otherwise good tool.

Which one should you run?

Choose Readeck if you want the closest thing to what Pocket was — a reader-first app whose job is making saved articles pleasant to read, with a current release and an active repo.

Choose wallabag if you want the mature option, annotations, and above all ePUB export to get saved articles onto an e-reader. Accept a heavier PHP stack and a fiddlier initial setup.

Choose linkding if speed and a tiny footprint matter more than reading experience, and you either do not need local archiving or are willing to run the latest-plus image with the RAM that Chromium wants.

Choose Shiori if you want one binary, no database server, and a CLI — with open eyes about a single-maintainer pace.

Choose neither, and read the bookmark-manager comparison instead, if what you actually want is durable full-page archival with heavy organization across thousands of links. That is a different job, and Karakeep vs Linkwarden resolves it.

Whichever you pick, it belongs on the same box as the rest of your stack — see self-hosted apps that replace SaaS for how this fits alongside the other dozen services worth running, and back it up: a reading archive you never backed up is a reading archive you will eventually lose, which is exactly what the 3-2-1 backup rule is for.

Karakeep vs Linkwarden — the bookmark-manager end of this category, organize vs archive
Self-hosted apps that replace SaaS — where a read-later app ranks against the other candidates
BookStack on Docker — for docs you write, rather than pages you save
Paperless-ngx setup — the same archive-and-search idea, for scanned paper
The 3-2-1 backup rule — because a self-hosted archive is only as good as its backups

Sources

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/building-whats-next/ — Mozilla’s phase-out announcement (2025-05-22)
https://web.archive.org/web/20260502145211id_/https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/future-of-pocket — Mozilla Support, shutdown and deletion dates (archived; the live host is behind a bot challenge)
https://web.archive.org/web/20250802094606id_/https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/future-of-pocket — earlier capture of the same page, carrying the third-party import list (archived)
https://web.archive.org/web/20260420164430id_/https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/exporting-your-pocket-list — Mozilla Support, export format (archived)
https://codeberg.org/readeck/readeck — Readeck source, releases and license
https://readeck.org/en/docs/ — Readeck documentation
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wallabag/wallabag/master/README.md — wallabag extraction stack
https://doc.wallabag.org/admin/installation/requirements/ — wallabag requirements
https://doc.wallabag.org/admin/installation/installation/ — wallabag Docker quick-start (SQLite)
https://doc.wallabag.org/user/articles/annotations/ — wallabag annotations
https://doc.wallabag.org/user/articles/download/ — wallabag export formats
https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding — linkding source, releases and license
https://linkding.link/installation/ — linkding installation and image variants
https://linkding.link/archiving/ — linkding archiving, latest-plus, SingleFile and the 1 GB RAM figure
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/go-shiori/shiori/master/README.md — Shiori design, storage backends and license
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/go-shiori/shiori/master/docs/faq.md — Shiori FAQ, maintenance pace

Community reports. The gotchas section and the tool-by-tool caveats draw on r/selfhosted threads read via a front-end mirror; the canonical thread URLs are below. Each is community sentiment — usually one or a few data points — not an authority, and is labelled as such in the body.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ktgzpf/ — the Pocket-shutdown thread
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1sc0vpd/ — “What bookmark manager are you currently using?”
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ea8w8o/ — “Current favourite read-it-later app — Readeck”
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1u4a11c/ — Reddit archiving broken across tools (June 2026)
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1pqspwj/ — “Still no true Omnivore read-it-later replacement?”
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1gr87l0/ — “Read it later application”
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fu8l1s/ — self-hosted read-it-later recommendations
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/186rsrv/ — wallabag scale and sync reports
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1q12fw3/ — Karakeep 2025 wrapped (maintainer post; treat as vendor claim)
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1pi72bt/ — Linkwarden mobile launch (maintainer post; treat as vendor claim)

What PSU Does an RTX 5070 Need? (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

650W. That is NVIDIA’s own minimum system power figure for the RTX 5070, a card rated at 250W total graphics power, and for most builds it is the right number to buy rather than a bare floor. Where it stops being right is a 200W-plus processor or a planned upgrade to a bigger card — both push you to 750W. A genuinely efficient build can sit on 550W, with one caveat worth knowing before you shop.

Here is where each of those numbers comes from.

The card’s actual power specification

Specification	RTX 5070
Total graphics power (TGP)	250W
NVIDIA required system power	650W
Power connectors	2x PCIe 8-pin (adapter in box), or one 300W-or-greater PCIe Gen 5 cable

Two things in that table matter more than the headline. First, the 250W is the card, while the 650W is the system — NVIDIA’s figure already carries an allowance for a processor, drives, and fans, which is why it lands 400W above the card itself. Second, the 5070 does not force you onto a 12V-2x6 cable: it ships with an adapter for two ordinary 8-pin PCIe connectors, so an older quality supply is still in play.

What a 5070 build actually draws

The graphics card is the biggest single number but not the whole story, and the processor swings the total more than anything else. Summing real component draw the way our PSU calculator does — 45W for an ATX motherboard, 5W per RAM stick, 8W for a Gen4 M.2 drive, 2W per case fan, 12W for an AIO, plus a 10W miscellaneous allowance — a reference build of two RAM sticks, one M.2 drive, four fans and an AIO adds 93W on top of the card and processor. That puts a 5070 build here:

Your processor	Example	System peak	Smallest PSU that works	Comfortable choice
65W	Ryzen 5 9600X	~408W	550W	650W
120W	Ryzen 7 7800X3D	~463W	650W	750W
170W	Ryzen 9 9950X	~513W	650W	750W
250W	Core i9-14900K, unrestricted	~593W	750W	850W

“Smallest that works” is peak draw plus a 20% margin, rounded up to a size actually sold. “Comfortable” is one size above that, putting your peak near 60-70% of the rating — workable and quiet, with room for a future card. Worth knowing if you also run the tool: its headline recommendation targets nearer half load, so it will suggest a larger unit than this column. Both are defensible; this table is the smaller, cheaper end of the range.

Whether a given processor will hold the card back in games is a separate question from what it costs you in watts — the PC bottleneck calculator answers that one for a specific pairing.

Notice that the mainstream gaming row lands exactly on NVIDIA’s 650W — a useful cross-check on the arithmetic, though NVIDIA does not publish the build behind its figure. Vendor minimums tend to be deliberately worst-case, so treat the agreement as confirmation rather than as proof they assumed this exact build. Either way, the recommendation moves the moment your CPU does.

When 650W is not the answer

Go to 750W if your CPU is a flagship. A 9950X or an unrestricted 14900K can pull more than double what an X3D gaming chip draws, and that difference lands entirely on your power budget. The 250W row above peaks at 593W — on a 650W unit that is 91% load, past the point where a supply is working hard enough to get loud and to risk tripping protection.

Go to 750W if you plan to upgrade the card. A 5070 Ti is a 300W card and NVIDIA’s minimum for it is 750W — so that upgrade costs you nothing extra if you buy 750W now. A 5080 is different: 360W, and NVIDIA asks for 850W, so stepping up to one is a power-supply purchase as well as a card purchase. If you are weighing that decision now, the RTX 5070 vs 5070 Ti comparison covers what the extra 50W buys you.

You can consider 550W if the build is genuinely lean — an efficient 65W processor, one drive, no AIO. The arithmetic supports it — that build peaks near 394W, which a 550W unit covers with margin. The practical caveat is a shopping one rather than an electrical one: in our experience shopping the category, quality ATX 3.x units below 650W are thin on the ground, so the 550W shelf skews older. If a good 550W and a good 650W are twenty dollars apart, take the 650W. Once the wattage is settled, our PSU tier list ranks the units actually worth buying at each size, with every placement sourced.

Transient spikes, honestly

Graphics cards draw in bursts rather than a flat line, and this is where PSU advice usually turns into “buy double.” It should not.

Intel’s ATX 3.0 design guide requires a compliant unit to survive excursions up to 200% of its rated wattage for 100 microseconds, with lower brackets for longer events. That headroom is already in the standard, but only under both conditions at once: the unit must be above 450W and ship a native 12V-2x6 connector. A 650W supply with that cable meets the bar; a 650W supply without one does not. Smaller units, or ones lacking the connector, are held to a lower requirement.

The practical translation for a 5070: on a compliant modern unit, size for your sustained peak plus the headroom in the table above and stop padding for spikes. On an older ATX 2.x supply, leave more room, because it was never designed against those brackets. The full methodology, including where every coefficient comes from, is published on the PSU calculator.

The connector

The 5070 accepts either two PCIe 8-pin cables — an adapter is in the box — or a single PCIe Gen 5 cable rated 300W or higher. Neither is more “correct”; the native Gen 5 cable is simply tidier and avoids stacking an adapter behind the card.

If you use the 12V-2x6 connector, seat it fully until it clicks and do not put a sharp bend right at the plug. The current design shortens the sense pins specifically so that a plug which is not fully seated fails to deliver full power rather than making partial, high-resistance contact.

If you already own the power supply

Check the label on the unit itself rather than guessing from the case badge. Most supplies report nothing to Windows — there is no standard sensor for it — so the label is the reliable answer; only high-end units with digital monitoring report telemetry, and then through their own software. What you want is the continuous 12V rating, not the peak sticker number. If the unit is multi-rail, follow the manual’s rail distribution and give the card its own cables instead of daisy-chaining one pigtail.

A supply that is merely old is not automatically a problem, but one that is failing looks a lot like one that is undersized — random shutdowns under load, reboots in games. PSU failure symptoms covers how to tell those two apart before you spend money on the wrong fix.

Lowering the number

Undervolting is the one free lever here. Dropping a card’s voltage cuts real wattage while holding clocks, and the effect is big enough to matter: at the roughly 50W our own results database reports for a mid-range card, the 120W-CPU build above falls from 463W to 413W — enough to drop it a PSU size — while running cooler and quieter. The complete GPU undervolting guide covers the method, and our undervolt results database lists what other owners actually measured card by card.

For where the 5070 sits against its alternatives on raw speed, see the GPU hierarchy; for the AMD side of this decision, the RTX 5070 vs RX 9070 comparison covers both power and performance.

Sources

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 official specifications — total graphics power, required system power, and supplementary power connectors — RTX 5070 family specifications, verified live 2026-07-25. The RTX 5070 Ti figures (300W, 750W) come from the same page.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 official specifications — the 360W total graphics power and 850W required system power cited in the upgrade section — RTX 5080 specifications, verified live 2026-07-25.
Intel ATX 3.0 desktop power supply design guide — the power-excursion brackets and the wattage/connector conditions that qualify a unit for them (Intel ATX 3.0 PSU power excursion).
Component draw coefficients and the sizing rules used in the build table are this site’s own published figures, listed in full in the PSU calculator methodology.

What PSU Does an RTX 5080 Need? (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

850W. That is NVIDIA’s required system power for the RTX 5080, a card rated at 360W, and for a normal build it is the number to buy rather than a floor to argue with. The variable that catches people out is not the processor — it is which 5080 you bought. A factory-overclocked board draws roughly 60W more than a Founders Edition, and at the top of the CPU range that difference is worth an entire power-supply tier.

The card’s actual power specification

Specification	RTX 5080
Total graphics power (TGP)	360W
NVIDIA required system power	850W
Power connectors	3x PCIe 8-pin (adapter in box), or one 450W-or-greater PCIe Gen 5 cable

Both connector figures moved up from the RTX 5070, which asks for two 8-pins or a 300W Gen 5 cable. That matters on an upgrade: an older supply with two spare 8-pin cables may not have a third, and a Gen 5 cable rated for a 5070 is not necessarily rated for this card. Check the cable, not just the wattage on the box.

Which 5080 did you buy?

This is the question that decides your answer, and it is specific to this tier. Summing component draw the way our PSU calculator does — 45W for an ATX board, 5W per RAM stick, 8W for a Gen4 M.2, 2W per fan, 12W for an AIO, plus a 10W miscellaneous allowance, so 93W for a reference build of two sticks, one drive, four fans and an AIO — the two variants land like this:

Your processor	360W Founders-class card	~420W factory-OC card
65W	518W peak → 650W	578W peak → 750W
120W	573W peak → 750W	633W peak → 850W
170W	623W peak → 750W	683W peak → 850W
250W	703W peak → 850W	763W peak → 1000W

Sizes are peak draw plus a 20% margin, rounded up to a wattage actually sold — the smallest unit that works, in the calculator’s language, not the most comfortable one. As on the 5070 page, one tier above each figure is the quieter, longer-lived choice. Read across any row: the overclocked board costs you a tier on its own — same silicon, different power target.

Our own reference card is the overclocked kind, and we have logged it. Across a 25-minute gaming session on the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC — 308 HWiNFO64 samples on the hand-tuned profile — board power averaged 261W and peaked at 326W. That is comfortably under the ~420W the calculator uses for an overclocked board, which is the point: you size a supply for the worst case it must survive, not for the average it will usually see.

Notice that our arithmetic for a Founders-class card with a mainstream CPU lands at 750W, below NVIDIA’s 850W. That is not a gap to exploit. Vendor minimums tend to be worst-case, and NVIDIA’s note on the RTX 5090 is the one place they show their assumption — that figure is based on a system built around a Ryzen 9 9950X, a flagship chip. Read their 850W as covering the bottom of that table rather than the middle, and buy it.

When 850W becomes 1000W

Three things push you up, and they stack:

A factory-overclocked board — roughly 60W over a Founders-class card.
A processor at or above 200W. A Ryzen 9 9950X sits right around 200W by our calculator’s figure; an unrestricted Core i9 goes well past it and lands you in the bottom row.
Manual overclocking or a raised power limit, which moves the card past its stock target entirely.

Any two together make 1000W the sensible buy. Whether a given processor limits your frame rate rather than your power budget is a different question — the PC bottleneck calculator covers that one.

Transient spikes, honestly

A 360W card draws in bursts rather than a flat line, and this is where PSU advice usually becomes “buy double.” It should not.

Intel’s ATX 3.0 design guide requires a compliant unit to survive excursions to 200% of its rated wattage for 100 microseconds, with lower brackets for longer events — but only where both conditions hold: the unit is above 450W and ships a native 12VHPWR / 12V-2x6 connector. An 850W ATX 3.x supply with that cable meets the bar; one without the native cable does not, whatever its wattage.

So on a compliant modern unit, size for sustained peak plus the headroom in the table and stop padding for spikes. On an older ATX 2.x supply paired with a 5080, leave more room — it was never designed against those brackets. The full methodology is published on the PSU calculator.

The undervolt that can buy a tier back

The 5080 sits right on a tier boundary, which makes undervolting worth more here than the raw watts suggest. Curve undervolting a 5080 is widely reported to cut 30–70W depending on where your silicon lands, and our own RTX 5080 undervolt guide uses that published range rather than a single number, because the spread between chips is the whole point.

Against the table above, even the middle of that range matters. A ~420W overclocked card with a 120W processor peaks near 633W and wants 850W; take 50W off and it peaks near 583W, which a 750W unit covers.

The honest caveat is that you cannot bank it in advance. Silicon varies, the range is wide, and a PSU has to cover the case where your card undervolts poorly. Buy for the stock figure, undervolt afterwards, and treat the saving as headroom you gained rather than money you saved. Our undervolt results database lists what specific cards achieved, with the source behind each row.

If you are coming from a smaller card

Sizing for an RTX 5070 is a different exercise — 250W, 650W of system power, two 8-pins — and it is covered in what PSU an RTX 5070 needs. Moving from a 5070 to a 5080 is genuinely a power-supply purchase as well as a card purchase, worth budgeting before the card arrives rather than after. Once you have the wattage settled, the which unit question is a different one again — that is what the PSU tier list answers, with every placement sourced. For where both cards land on raw speed, see the GPU hierarchy.

Sources

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 official specifications — total graphics power, required system power, and supplementary power connectors — RTX 5080 specifications, verified live 2026-07-25.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 specifications, for the upgrade comparison — RTX 5070 family, verified live 2026-07-25.
Intel ATX 3.0 desktop power supply design guide — the excursion brackets and the wattage/connector conditions that qualify a unit (Intel ATX 3.0 PSU power excursion).
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 specifications — the note stating its minimum-system-power figure is based on a system configured with a Ryzen 9 9950X — RTX 5090, verified live 2026-07-25.
The ~420W figure for a factory-overclocked 5080 is this site’s own sizing estimate, taken from the GPU list in the PSU calculator; it is a conservative peak for sizing, not a measured gaming draw.
The 261W average / 326W peak board-power figures are our own first-party telemetry: 308 HWiNFO64 samples across a 25-minute gaming session on the hand-tuned profile, published in the ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC review with the raw dataset.
The 30–70W curve-undervolting range is the published community range cited in our RTX 5080 undervolt guide.
Component draw coefficients and sizing rules are this site’s own published figures, listed in full in the PSU calculator methodology.

What PSU Does an RTX 5090 Need? (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

1000W is the floor. 1200W is the buy. NVIDIA lists 1000W of required system power for the RTX 5090 and recommends a PCIe CEM 5.1 compliant unit — and unusually, they tell you what that number assumes: a system built around a Ryzen 9 9950X. Run our own itemized arithmetic on exactly that pairing and it lands nearer 1200W. This is the one card in the range where our math comes out above the vendor minimum rather than below it, and that is worth understanding before you spend.

The card’s actual power specification

Specification	RTX 5090
Total graphics power (TGP)	575W
NVIDIA required system power	1000W (stated basis: Ryzen 9 9950X)
Power connectors	4x PCIe 8-pin (adapter in box), or one 600W PCIe Gen 5 cable
PSU standard	NVIDIA recommends a PCIe CEM 5.1 compliant unit

Two things here appear nowhere else in the 50-series lineup. NVIDIA names the processor behind its figure — everywhere else the assumption is invisible — and it recommends a specific PSU standard rather than just a wattage. Both matter more than the headline number.

Why our number is higher than NVIDIA’s

On the 5070 and 5080 our arithmetic came out below NVIDIA’s minimum, and the honest advice was to buy the vendor number anyway. The 5090 inverts that.

Summing component draw the way our PSU calculator does — 45W for an ATX board, 5W per RAM stick, 8W for a Gen4 M.2, 2W per fan, 12W for an AIO, plus a 10W miscellaneous allowance, so 93W for a reference build of two sticks, one drive, four fans and an AIO:

Your processor	575W Founders-class card	~660W factory-OC card
65W	733W peak → 1000W	818W peak → 1000W
120W	788W peak → 1000W	873W peak → 1200W
200W (the 9950X NVIDIA assumes)	868W peak → 1200W	953W peak → 1200W
250W	918W peak → 1200W	1003W peak → 1500W

Sizes are peak draw plus a 20% margin, rounded up to a wattage actually sold — the smallest unit that works, not the most comfortable.

Read the third row. On the exact processor NVIDIA cites, our rule says 1200W where they say 1000W. A 1000W unit is not wrong there — 868W peak on 1000W is 87% load, which will run — but it is above the 80% line where our own efficiency table starts warning, and it leaves nothing for an overclock or a future card. That is why the recommendation here is a tier above the vendor floor rather than equal to it.

The connector is not optional in the same way

The 5070 takes two 8-pins, the 5080 three, the 5090 four — or a single 600W PCIe Gen 5 cable. Stacking four 8-pin adapters behind a card is where cable management stops being cosmetic, and it is the practical reason most 5090 owners end up on a native 12V-2x6 cable rather than the bundled adapter.

NVIDIA’s recommendation of a PCIe CEM 5.1 compliant supply is the part to take seriously. It is not a wattage rating; it is the connector and excursion standard the card was validated against. A 1200W unit that predates it is a worse pairing than a 1000W unit that meets it. Our PSU tier list marks which current units carry a native 12V-2x6 header and which only ship the cable, which is exactly the distinction that matters here.

Seat the connector fully until it clicks, and do not bend it sharply at the plug. The current design shortens the sense pins precisely so a partially seated plug fails to deliver full power instead of making high-resistance contact.

Transient behaviour at 575W

Intel’s ATX 3.0 design guide requires a compliant unit to survive excursions to 200% of its rated wattage for 100 microseconds, with lower brackets for longer events — but only where the unit is above 450W and ships a native 12VHPWR / 12V-2x6 connector. Any supply you would sensibly pair with a 5090 clears the wattage half of that test easily; the connector half is the one to check.

Where this card differs from the rest of the range is margin. On a 650W build a spike has proportionally more headroom above it; at 868W peak on a 1000W unit, there is far less room before protection trips. That is the second argument for 1200W, independent of the efficiency one.

What undervolting changes

A 575W card is where the absolute savings are largest — our results database records around 100W off flagship-class cards, roughly double what a mid-range card gives back. On the 200W-CPU row that moves peak draw from 868W to about 768W, which brings a 1000W unit back to a comfortable 77% rather than 87%.

That is a real argument for tuning the card, but not for buying a smaller supply in advance. Silicon varies, the saving is not guaranteed, and a power supply has to cover the case where your card undervolts badly. Buy for the stock figure and treat the saving as headroom you gained. The complete GPU undervolting guide covers the method, and the undervolt results database lists what specific cards achieved.

If you are stepping up from a 5080

The jump is 360W to 575W — 215W more card, and a move from three 8-pins to four. An 850W supply that suited a 5080 does not carry a 5090, so budget the power supply alongside the card. What PSU an RTX 5080 needs covers that tier, and the GPU hierarchy shows what the extra power actually buys in frames.

Sources

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 official specifications — total graphics power, required system power and its stated Ryzen 9 9950X basis, the supplementary power connectors, and the PCIe CEM 5.1 recommendation — RTX 5090, verified live 2026-07-25.
Intel ATX 3.0 desktop power supply design guide — the excursion brackets and the wattage/connector conditions that qualify a unit (Intel ATX 3.0 PSU power excursion).
The ~660W figure for a factory-overclocked 5090 is this site’s own sizing estimate from the GPU list in the PSU calculator — a conservative peak for sizing, not a measured draw.
Component draw coefficients and sizing rules are this site’s own published figures, listed in full in the PSU calculator methodology.

GPU Undervolt Settings Database: Real Results by Card (2026)

LK Wood IV — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-24 · ~6 min read · St. Louis County, MO

Undervolting is one of the highest-value ten-minute tweaks in a PC — but the single question everyone asks is “what settings should I actually use for my card?” Published guides give a method; this page gives data: an open, crowdsourced table of real undervolt settings and the results people measured, one row per tested configuration.

It is the data companion to our complete guide to undervolting your GPU, which walks through the method itself on both NVIDIA and AMD. Use that to learn how; use the table below to see where other people’s cards landed.

The results

Each row is a real, sourced result. NVIDIA rows list the MSI Afterburner voltage-frequency point (voltage @ clock); AMD rows list the Adrenalin offset (or, on RDNA 3, the absolute max voltage) plus any power-limit change. Where a number was not measured, the cell is blank rather than guessed.

8 verified results CC BY 4.0 · updated 2026-07-24 · open dataset

Community GPU undervolt results — measured settings and outcomes, one row per tested configuration. Sourced; contribute your card by pull request.
GPU	Method & setting	Power saved	Temp drop	FPS change	Stability test	Source
RTX 5080ASUS ROG Astral OC	950 mV @ 2750 MHz, power limit 90%MSI Afterburner V/F curve	~50 W	—	±0% (parity)	Settings follow the worked example in our RTX 5080 undervolt guide; the ~50W saving sits inside the 30-70W range that guide cites from community testing at hardware review sites. Not a logged before/after measurement on our own card.	TechFuel HQ
RX 9070 XTSapphire NITRO+	-100 mV offset (power limit left at stock)AMD Adrenalin voltage offset	—	—	+10%	Stress-tested in a demanding game after stepping the offset down from -40 mV; validated in real play, not just a short benchmark	www.xda-developers.com · 2
RTX 4090	940 mV @ 2700 MHz (+1200 memory)MSI Afterburner V/F curve	~100 W	—	±0% (parity)	Loop a demanding title / stress test (instability shows as crashes or black screens). FE silicon often stable ~925 mV; AIB cards ~950-975 mV.	forums.overclockers.co.uk · 2
RTX 4080 Super	950 mV @ 2760 MHzMSI Afterburner V/F curve	~50 W	~8°C	±0% (parity)	Extended in-game / ray-tracing stress test (not just synthetics); some cards need +12-25 mV in heavy RT titles.	evezone.evetech.co.za · 2
RTX 5090	900 mV @ 2800 MHz (flatten curve above the point)MSI Afterburner V/F curve	~100 W	~10°C	-2%	Several hours in a memory-heavy title (Cyberpunk 2077 / Monster Hunter). Verify your Afterburner build supports 50-series curve editing.	www.overclock.net · 2
RTX 5070 Ti	935 mV @ 2955 MHz (via +450 MHz core offset), +1500 memoryMSI Afterburner V/F curve	~50 W	—	+4%	Flatten the V/F curve at the target point; achievable clock at 935 mV varies by card (~2932-2945 MHz measured on the source unit).	www.esportstales.com · 2
RX 7900 XTX	1100 mV max voltage (~-50 mV vs ~1150 mV stock), power limit +15%AMD Adrenalin max voltage (RDNA3 absolute)	—	—	±0% (parity)	Lower max voltage in 10-15 mV steps; if it crashes/black-screens, raise 10-15 mV and retest (an invalid UV just resets on reboot). Validate with 15-20 min stress + 20-30 min gameplay.	tier1settings.com · 2
RX 9070	-100 mV offset, -30% power limit (efficiency-biased)AMD Adrenalin voltage offset	—	—	-7%	-100 mV reported daily-stable; community reports crashes past ~-170 mV. This is an EFFICIENCY tune: the -30% power limit trades ~7% FPS for large power/thermal savings. A milder -80 to -100 mV at 0% power limit is the performance-neutral option.	www.notebookcheck.net · 2

Have results for your card? This is an open dataset — add a row by pull request against data/undervolt_results.json. Submit a pull request against https://github.com/iBlessi/gpu-undervolt-db adding one object to the "results" array in data/undervolt_results.json. The repository's .github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md fills in automatically with the required fields and methodology, and an automated check validates schema, plausibility, and sourcing on every PR. Every numeric value must cite a resolvable source.

How to read it

Method & setting — the exact tune. NVIDIA cards undervolt through the MSI Afterburner voltage-frequency curve (pin a low-voltage point to your stock clock); AMD cards use a negative voltage offset in Adrenalin.
Power saved / temp drop — the efficiency win at the same performance. This is where the value is on most cards.
FPS change — usually ±0% (same frames, cooler and quieter). A positive number means the card was power-limited, so freeing voltage let it boost higher — the reason the RX 9070 XT can gain about 10% FPS.
Silicon lottery — treat every row as a starting point, not a guarantee. Two identical cards can need 25–50mV apart. Start conservative, test, and step down.

None of the seed rows is a logged first-party before/after run yet — they are community-consensus settings, community-verified results, and review-measured values, each with its source linked in the table. Our own RTX 5080 and RX 9070 XT guides are where those settings are worked through. First-party measured rows are exactly what this database is built to accumulate, starting with submissions.

Contribute your card

This dataset grows by submission, and the submissions repository is now open: github.com/iBlessi/gpu-undervolt-db. There is no login to create, no account, and no backend — git is the moderation queue. To add your result:

Undervolt your card (our guide covers the method) and record what you changed and what you measured.
Fork the repo and add one object to the results array in data/undervolt_results.json, then open a pull request. The submission template fills in automatically with the field guide and checklist — the card, the offset or voltage curve you set, and the numbers you measured.
An automated check runs on your PR. It blocks on hard problems — malformed schema, impossible values, a missing source — and warns on statistical outliers, which can still merge but are held out of the table above until a maintainer confirms them. You can run the same check locally with python scripts/undervolt_outlier_flag.py --check.

Prefer not to use GitHub? Email hello@techfuelhq.com with the same information and we will open the pull request for you.

The only hard rule is honesty: every number should trace to something real — a review, a forum thread, or your own screenshot. Unmeasured fields stay null. Implausible submissions are flagged and held out of the table until reviewed.

What the data shows so far

Undervolting is almost free performance. Across every card here, the tuned result is the same frames (or a few more) at meaningfully lower power and temperature.
The bigger the card, the bigger the win. A 575W RTX 5090 or 450W RTX 4090 reclaims ~100W; a mid-range card saves ~50W. The power & cost calculator turns those watts into dollars per year.
Power-limited cards gain FPS. The RX 9070 XT is the clearest example — undervolting lets it hold higher clocks within its power budget.
The consensus voltages are tight. Modern NVIDIA cards cluster at 900–950mV; RDNA 4 AMD cards at -80 to -100mV. That convergence is exactly what a crowdsourced dataset is good at confirming.

Sources and methodology

Every row cites its source in the table. Community rows link to the review or forum thread the numbers came from; rows drawn from our own guides link to the guide that works the settings through. The dataset is published under CC BY 4.0, and the field definitions and contribution rules travel with it in the file’s own meta block. If you find an error, open a pull request against the repository or email hello@techfuelhq.com with the card and the correction — corrections are treated the same as new submissions and are checked against a source before the table changes.

How to Undervolt Your GPU: The Complete Guide (2026)

LK Wood IV — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-24 · ~9 min read · St. Louis County, MO

What undervolting actually does

Every graphics card leaves the factory with more voltage than it strictly needs. AMD and NVIDIA program a voltage-frequency curve that has to keep the worst chip of a given model stable, so most cards run higher voltage at a given clock than their particular silicon requires. Undervolting reclaims that margin: you tell the card to run the same clocks at a lower voltage.

The payoff comes in one of two forms, depending on your card:

Lower heat, power, and noise at the same performance. Less voltage means less power turned into heat, so temperatures drop, fans spin slower, and the card is quieter — with the same frame rates.
A few more frames. On a card that runs into its power limit under load (common on higher-end GPUs), lowering voltage frees up power budget, and the boost algorithm spends it on higher sustained clocks. That’s why undervolting can come out slightly faster, not slower.

It is one of the highest-value ten-minute tweaks in a PC, it costs nothing, and it’s fully reversible. This guide covers the method for both brands; for card-specific settings and measured results, it links down to our worked examples on a NVIDIA RTX 5080 and an AMD RX 9070 XT.

Before you start: baseline your card

You can’t tell an improvement from a placebo without a reference point. Run a demanding game or a benchmark for 10–15 minutes with a monitoring overlay (HWiNFO64, or AMD’s built-in metrics), and note four numbers under sustained load:

Core clock (the sustained clock, not the momentary boost spike)
Core voltage (VID / SVI)
Power draw (board watts)
Temperature — watch the hotspot / junction temperature, not just the edge temperature

Those are the numbers you’re trying to beat: same or higher clock, at lower power and temperature.

NVIDIA: the MSI Afterburner curve

NVIDIA cards are undervolted through MSI Afterburner’s voltage-frequency curve editor — the same tool works across every NVIDIA card, and on AMD cards too. The method:

Download and open MSI Afterburner and press Ctrl+F to open the curve editor — a graph of clock (MHz) against voltage (mV).
Note where your card runs at stock under load (from your baseline). Pick a lower voltage target — around 0.9V (900mV) is a widely used, safe starting point — and drag that point up to your stock sustained clock.
Flatten the curve to the right of your chosen point so the card can’t climb back to higher voltages, then click Apply.
Stress test (below). Once stable, save the profile and enable “apply at startup” so it loads every boot.

The idea is simple: you’re forcing the card to hit its normal clock at a lower voltage, and capping it there. For the full curve-editor walkthrough with measured before/after numbers on a current card, see the RTX 5080 undervolt guide.

AMD: the Adrenalin voltage offset

AMD makes this easier — everything is built into AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, so there’s no third-party tool. Rather than editing a curve point by point, you apply a negative voltage offset across the whole curve:

Press Alt+R to open Adrenalin, go to Performance → Tuning, and set the Tuning Control to Custom.
Enable GPU Tuning and lower the voltage with a negative offset — start conservative at around -40mV.
Optionally enable Power Tuning and trim the power limit (around -10% as a mild starting cut keeps performance closest to stock while lowering temperatures; deeper cuts trade performance for efficiency).
Apply, stress test, and step the offset deeper (toward -80 to -100mV) as stability allows.

The RX 9070 XT undervolt guide covers the Adrenalin controls, the community-converged offsets, and the efficiency-versus-performance trade in full. Older AMD cards and ASUS cards can also use GPU Tweak III, but the Adrenalin route works on any modern Radeon.

Test for stability (don’t skip this)

An undervolt that looks fine for five minutes and crashes an hour into a game is worse than no undervolt. Test it properly:

Run a demanding, real game or a benchmark like 3DMark for at least 15 minutes — longer is better.
Watch for crashes, driver timeouts (a black screen that recovers), or artifacts — these mean the voltage is too low for the clock you set. Raise the voltage (NVIDIA) or reduce the negative offset (AMD) slightly and retest.
A common trap: an undervolt can pass a heavy all-core stress test but crash at lighter loads, so play normally for a few hours before you trust it.

When a setting survives real use, you’ve found your card’s stable point. Save it.

What to expect

Results vary by chip and by game — no two cards are identical — but the pattern is consistent: lower temperatures and power draw, quieter fans, and either the same or slightly better performance. On efficiency-focused cards the win is mostly thermal and acoustic; on power-limited, higher-end cards, undervolting can recover a few percent of performance on top. The power & cost calculator turns the watts you save into an annual dollar figure, and the PSU wattage calculator sizes a supply for the card’s real peak.

Card-specific guides and the CPU too

The steps above are the general method; the exact voltages and results depend on your specific card. For measured, step-by-step walkthroughs:

RTX 5080 undervolt guide — the NVIDIA / MSI Afterburner curve, tuned for efficiency and 24/7 AI-inference use.
RX 9070 XT undervolt guide — the AMD / Adrenalin offset, including why this power-limited card can gain FPS.

And to see where other people’s cards landed — the RTX 4090, 5090, RX 7900 XTX and more — the GPU undervolt settings database is an open, crowdsourced table of real settings and their measured results. Look up your card, or add yours by pull request.

And undervolting isn’t only for the GPU. Modern AMD CPUs undervolt through Curve Optimizer, which follows the same logic — lower voltage, freed headroom, cooler or faster. If you run a Ryzen X3D chip, the 9800X3D undervolt guide applies the same idea to the processor.

Pick your card, follow the method, and test it honestly. Ten minutes buys a cooler, quieter, and often slightly faster GPU, for free.

Sources

The general method (MSI Afterburner voltage-frequency curve for NVIDIA; ~0.9V as a common safe starting target; AMD Adrenalin for Radeon cards) reflects the long-established, widely-documented consensus across community guides and vendor documentation, and is applied with measured, card-specific numbers in our linked RTX 5080 and RX 9070 XT guides.
How-To Geek — 8 Tips for Undervolting Your Gaming GPU (AMD Adrenalin method; per-game profiles) — verified live 2026-07-24
MSI Afterburner is the free NVIDIA/AMD tuning utility used for the curve method; download it from MSI’s official Afterburner page.
Card-specific measurements and community-consensus settings are cited in the linked RTX 5080 and RX 9070 XT undervolt guides.

PC Builder Parts Dataset 2026: Verified Specs, Honestly Dated

LK Wood IV — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-24 · Updated 2026-08-01 · ~5 min read · St. Louis County, MO

What this is — the PC Builder parts dataset, verified and honestly dated

126 parts, 7 categories — CPU, GPU, motherboard, RAM, storage, PSU, case — with the specification and compatibility fields the PC Builder runs on.
Every row added in the 2026-07-29 expansion cites its source — the manufacturer, Newegg, or B&H specification page its specs were read from.
Prices were removed on 2026-08-01. They were Amazon-observed street prices, and our Amazon Associates participation means Amazon price data only appears through Amazon's approved mechanisms. The change log below has the full story.
Open data (CC BY 4.0). Fork it, remix it, build on it — attribution required.

The short version

This page is the canonical home of the TechFuelHQ PC Builder parts dataset — 126 off-the-shelf components with verified specifications and the compatibility fields that make a build checker possible: socket, supported chipsets, RAM type, TDP, GPU length, PSU wattage, case clearance. The interactive PC Builder is built directly on this file and does the compatibility math for you.

The dataset’s founding rule is freshness honesty: every row carries the date it was last verified, and a date only moves when the row is actually re-confirmed. Numbers we cannot stand behind do not ship — rows have been retired under that rule, and on 2026-08-01 the same rule retired an entire field. The details are below, stated plainly, because a dataset that documents its own corrections is worth more than one that pretends it never needed any.

Why the prices left, in plain language

Until 2026-08-01 this dataset also carried street prices. The 97 rows added in the 2026-07-29 expansion each recorded a price observed on Amazon.com, attributed to the exact listing it was read from. That attribution was the honest way to publish an observed number — and it is also what made the arrangement untenable: TechFuelHQ participates in the Amazon Associates program, and the program’s policies only permit showing Amazon price data through Amazon’s own mechanisms, which keep displayed prices current. A dated public snapshot, openly licensed for reuse, is not that.

So the price fields came out — price_usd, price_source, and price_asin on all 97 expansion rows. The 29 pre-expansion rows went through the same review the same day, and the same reading reached them: their original methodology note lists Amazon among the retailer sources, and without per-row attribution there is no way to clear any individual figure as non-Amazon. Their prices came out too. The dataset now carries no prices at all — and nothing else changed: the specifications, the compatibility fields, and the per-row source specification pages are exactly as verified.

Re-pricing from sources that carry no such restrictions — manufacturer MSRPs, other retailers — is planned. When prices return, they will return with the same per-row provenance discipline the specs already have.

What the dataset covers

Category	Parts	Spec highlights
CPU	30	cores, threads, boost clock, TDP, socket, supported chipsets
GPU	25	VRAM, board power, length, recommended PSU
Motherboard	16	socket, chipset, RAM type, form factor
RAM (DDR5)	13	capacity, speed, timings, rank
Storage (SSD)	15	interface, rated speeds, endurance
Power supply	12	wattage, efficiency rating, connectors
Case	15	form factor, max GPU length

97 of the 126 rows were verified on 2026-07-29; 23 carry 2026-07-24 and 6 carry 2026-06-09, kept because their exact SKU could not be re-confirmed on the later pass. Each row’s last_verified field tells you which is which.

How verification works

Verification is a deliberate pass, not a scrape. In the 2026-07-29 expansion, any candidate part whose specifications could not be confirmed against a page that actually loaded was dropped rather than estimated — 41 candidates went that way, including every part from several vendors whose sites refuse automated retrieval. That constraint is visible in the data: NVIDIA add-in-board rows skew toward ASUS because it was the one board partner whose specification pages could be read. PCIe lane counts appear only where a retrieved page stated them explicitly.

One row was retired in the same pass: a DDR5-7200 kit whose stored figure had drifted far from anything observable in the market. Rather than leave a number we could not stand behind in an openly licensed dataset, the row came out. The 2026-08-01 price removal is that same rule applied at field scale.

Where the specs come from

Expansion rows (2026-07-29) cite the manufacturer, Newegg, or B&H specification page each was read from, in the row’s source field. Pre-expansion rows were compiled from manufacturer pages, TechPowerUp, Tom’s Hardware, and verified retailer listings. Performance-tier labels are TechFuelHQ editorial assessments based on aggregate review consensus — except where a part appears in a TechFuelHQ open bench dataset, in which case its tier is anchored to first-party measurements. Treat them as rough tiering, not head-to-head benchmark claims.

Use the data (CC BY 4.0)

The PC Builder parts dataset is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may share and adapt it, including commercially, as long as you attribute TechFuelHQ and link back.

Attribution line (copy-paste):

TechFuelHQ PC Builder Parts Dataset (CC BY 4.0). https://techfuelhq.com/tools/pc-builder/

The raw JSON carries the per-row last_verified dates and the full methodology note in _meta, so downstream projects can key off both directly.

Change log

2026-08-01 — v2.1.0. Prices removed from the 29 pre-expansion rows after the same policy review: their original methodology note lists Amazon among the retailer sources and no per-row attribution exists to separate the figures. The dataset is now entirely price-free. Three dollar-band part notes retiered to plain tier language.
2026-08-01 — v2.0.0. Price fields (price_usd, price_source, price_asin) removed from the 97 expansion rows for Amazon Associates program-policy compliance; three part notes that referenced observed prices rewritten. Specs, compatibility fields, and source pages unchanged. Re-pricing from non-restricted sources planned.
2026-07-29 — v1.2.0. Expansion from 30 parts to 126; per-row source provenance introduced; one stale row retired; 41 unconfirmable candidates dropped rather than estimated.
2026-07-24 — v1.0. Initial public release, 30 parts.

The dataset version at each change is recorded in the raw JSON’s _meta, and dataset_version above always matches the file being served.

PC Builder — interactive parts picker — this dataset, with interactive compatibility and PSU-wattage checks
TechFuelHQ Datasets — the dataset home, license posture, and provenance
DDR5 RAM buying guide — why RAM sits expensive in 2026
$2,500 7800X3D + RTX 5080 4K build — where these parts land in a real build

The 3-2-1 Backup Rule for Homelabs (2026)

LK Wood IV — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-24 · Updated 2026-07-24 · ~12 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · 3 copies, 2 devices, 1 off-site — and RAID is none of them

The rule. Three copies of your data, on two different devices, with one copy off-site. Your live data is copy 1, so you still need two more.
RAID is not a backup. It is redundancy for uptime. A deletion, a ransomware run or a bad update hits every disk in the array at once.
A snapshot on the same box is not a backup either. A ZFS snapshot lives in the same pool it protects — it dies with the pool.
The off-site copy is the one people skip, and it is the one that survives fire, theft and flood. Cloud object storage (B2, S3) or a box at another building.
3-2-1-1-0 adds one immutable/air-gapped copy (defeats ransomware) and zero errors (verify and test-restore).

This page is the platform-agnostic strategy. The tool and per-platform how-tos live in the linked guides — pick your three copies here first, then go implement them.

The short version

The 3-2-1 rule is one sentence: keep three copies of your data, on two different media, with one copy off-site (Backblaze). It is usually traced to photographer Peter Krogh’s The DAM Book, though vendors hedge the attribution and even disagree on the year, so treat the origin as folklore and the rule as the point.

Almost every explanation of it online is written by an enterprise backup vendor selling immutable cloud storage. The rule is sound; the framing assumes a data center. This guide translates it for the machine in your basement — and spends most of its length on the two things those pages gloss over, because they are the two things homelabbers actually get wrong: RAID is not one of the three copies, and neither is a snapshot on the same box.

Get the three copies right conceptually first. The tool you use to move bytes is a later, smaller decision.

What the three numbers actually mean

3 — three copies, and your live data is one of them. Your three copies are your original production data plus two more (Backblaze). In a homelab, the files on your NAS or server that you use every day are copy 1. So you already hold one of the three — you need two more copies, not three from scratch. Enterprise framing counts differently: it treats the production data as the data rather than a copy at all — a distinction homelabbers argue over directly (r/DataHoarder). For a home lab, three copies including the original is the usual and reasonable target.

2 — two different media, which today means two different devices. The original rule said two media types — the classic example was disk plus tape. Modern guidance relaxes that: you store the data on two different storage media “such as a local drive and a cloud storage service” (Backblaze). So a local disk and a cloud bucket already satisfy the “2.” The reason the “2” exists at all is common-mode failure: two identical drives, bought together and run under identical conditions, tend to fail together. Nakivo puts it plainly — keeping all your backups “on the same type of storage media makes it more likely that both devices would fail at about the same time due to a defect or simple wear and tear” (Nakivo). The homelab-practical reading of the “2”: don’t put every copy on drives from the same batch.

1 — one copy off-site, far enough that one disaster can’t take all three. Keep one copy “off-site in a remote location, ideally more than a few miles away from your other two copies to protect against natural and physical disasters” (Backblaze). A NAS and a second backup disk in the same room are still one house fire away from total loss. This is the copy people skip, and it is the copy that matters most.

RAID is not a backup. Neither is a snapshot on the same box.

This is the heart of it, and it is where the homelab community is as close to unanimous as it ever gets.

RAID gives you redundancy for uptime — the array keeps serving while you swap a failed drive. That is genuinely valuable, and it is not a backup. On a fresh r/selfhosted thread asking exactly whether RAIDZ counts as one of the 3-2-1 copies, the original poster was downvoted to zero and the answers were blunt: “Raid is NOT a backup! Raid is a redundancy against a drive failure and nothing more” (r/selfhosted). The clearest statement of why came from someone actively replacing a dead drive: “raid is for uptime… But if I change a file or delete it on accident then it’ll still be gone from the entire system. Raid doesn’t help with that” (r/selfhosted).

The list of what RAID does not protect against is exactly the list of things that actually kill homelab data: “fat-fingering an rm -rf, ransomware encrypting the array, a bad update corrupting data, or the whole box getting stolen or fried in a fire. All of those replicate across every disk in the array instantly because RAID doesn’t know the difference between a good write and a mistake” (r/selfhosted). A mirror is the same trap: delete a file and it is deleted on the mirror too.

Snapshots are the subtler version of the same mistake. A ZFS snapshot is “a read-only copy of a file system or volume” (OpenZFS) — but it lives inside the same pool as the data it captures. It “initially consume[s] no additional space within the pool,” growing as the active data changes (OpenZFS). Because it shares the pool’s disks, it shares the pool’s fate: pool fails, snapshots gone. A snapshot protects against you deleting a file by accident. It does nothing about the disks themselves dying, or the machine being stolen. It is not one of your three copies until it has been sent somewhere else.

So: run RAID for availability if you want it, take snapshots for fast rollback — both are good. Just count zero of your three copies against either one.

Choose your three copies before you choose a tool

The mistake is starting from “which backup software should I use.” Start from where each copy physically lives, and the tool falls out of that almost automatically.

Copy 1 — live data: already exists, on your NAS, server or desktop.
Copy 2 — local backup: a separate disk or a separate box, on-site. This is the copy you restore from fastest when something breaks, because it is on your own network rather than at the far end of a home internet connection. One r/DataHoarder commenter framed the whole point of the on-site copy cleanly: “The primary backup is the one that provides the fastest data recovery” (r/DataHoarder).
Copy 3 — off-site: cloud object storage, or a machine somewhere else.

Only once you know where a copy lands do you pick the software, and the destination decides it: a cloud bucket points you at restic or Kopia, an SSH box at Borg — that comparison picks the file-level tool by where the backup lands, and corrects the four-year-stale myth that restic has no compression. restic writes directly to Amazon S3 and Backblaze B2 (restic docs); Kopia targets S3-compatible storage, B2, GCS and Azure (Kopia docs); and rclone bridges to “over 70 cloud storage products” if you just need to push an existing backup set off-site (rclone).

The off-site copy: how to actually build copy 3

This is the copy most homelabs never finish, so make it the one you automate first.

For a file-level off-site copy, automated off-site backups with restic builds exactly this leg end to end — a Backblaze B2 repository on a systemd timer, client-side encryption and deduplication, a 7-daily / 4-weekly / 6-monthly retention policy, and monitoring on failure, at roughly $1.40/month for 200 GB (Backblaze B2 is $6.95/TB/month). It assumes copies 1 and 2 already exist and builds copy 3.

Two things the tutorials can’t decide for you, but this strategy layer should flag:

If your backup client holds credentials that can delete, so can whatever compromises that client. If the machine being backed up is breached, unrestricted credentials sitting on it can wipe the repository — the exact scenario off-site backup exists to survive. Turn on object lock or versioning at the bucket, and scope the client’s key to write-and-list without delete. Hardening the off-site copy this way is also how most homelabs satisfy the “+1 immutable” of 3-2-1-1-0 — the same copy 3, made immutable, rather than a separate fourth copy.
Egress costs at restore time. Cold-storage tiers are cheap to fill and expensive to empty. As one r/DataHoarder thread warned about Glacier specifically: “Before you store anything at all in Glacier make sure you understand the cost of getting your files out” (r/DataHoarder). The cheapest storage tier is not the cheapest backup if you ever have to restore from it in a hurry.

The per-platform how-tos

The strategy is platform-agnostic; the implementation is not. Two common homelab stacks have a native path:

Proxmox. If your data lives in VMs and LXC containers, Proxmox Backup Server in a 3-2-1 layout builds copies 2 and 3 for you — a deduplicated local datastore, incremental backups that read and send only the delta, SHA-256 verification, and an off-site leg via a sync job to a second PBS or restic to B2. PBS deduplication means “periodic backups produce large amounts of duplicate data… the deduplication layer avoids redundancy and minimizes the storage space used” (PBS docs), so retaining many restore points stays affordable.

ZFS. If you are on ZFS, Sanoid and Syncoid automate the snapshot policy and then replicate it off the box — Syncoid “facilitates the asynchronous incremental replication of ZFS filesystems” (sanoid). That replication step is the important one: it is what turns a same-pool snapshot (not a backup) into a genuine second or third copy on separate hardware.

Both are implementations of the same three copies. Neither replaces the strategy on this page; they execute two legs of it.

3-2-1-1-0: the modern extension, and why ransomware forced it

The classic rule predates ransomware that specifically hunts backups. So vendors extended it. Veeam’s version: “we extended the rule to 3-2-1-1-0. It adds one immutable copy, and results in zero recovery errors” (Veeam).

The extra 1 — one offline, air-gapped or immutable copy (Veeam community). This is the copy malware cannot reach or rewrite. One mechanism is write-once-read-many storage: immutable backups “cannot be modified or deleted” (Nakivo), which matters because “ransomware increasingly targets backups. If your only protection is connected to your network, it can be compromised” (Veeam). In a homelab this is typically your off-site copy 3 with object lock on a B2 or S3 bucket, or a copy you physically disconnect — you harden an existing copy rather than add a whole new one. Sync alone is not enough — if a device is compromised and its files are encrypted, “if you don’t notice in time then it will eventually propagate to ALL your backups being unreadable” (r/DataHoarder).

The 0 — zero errors, which means you verify and test-restore. A job that reported success is not a backup you can restore until you have proven it. For restic, run check regularly, and add --read-data so it verifies “the actual pack files on disk,” catching bit rot rather than only structural consistency (restic docs). For Proxmox Backup Server, “it is recommended that you reverify all backups at least monthly, even if a previous verification was successful” (PBS docs). And beyond automated checks, restore a real file on a schedule. The pointed r/DataHoarder version of this: “So… have you tested your restore processes?” (r/DataHoarder).

The gotchas that never make it into the diagram

Five things from real homelab setups that the clean vendor version omits:

Two copies on drives from the same batch can fail as one. During the SanDisk Extreme SSD failures, people “were getting bitten by having all three copies of their data on three different Sandisk Extreme SSDs, all of which were from the defective batch” (r/DataHoarder). This is the real reason the “2” exists — mix brands or manufacture dates.
The RAID rebuild is when the second drive dies. A real anecdote of a second disk failing mid-rebuild, twice: “The first time it was rebuilding a raid5 and everything was lost. The second time it was rebuilding a raid6 because I learned” (r/DataHoarder). Redundancy is most fragile exactly when you are leaning on it.
Paying a cloud provider is not the same as them backing up your data. “Unless specified in the SLA for whatever you pay for, it’s better to assume that there is no backup of your data” (r/DataHoarder). Commodity object storage is durable, not versioned-for-you.
On-site is usually the primary because it restores fastest, not because it’s safer. “restoring 100TB from a local backup takes me a couple days vs a few weeks to restore from an off-site backup over the internet” (r/DataHoarder). Bandwidth, not location, decides which copy you reach for first.
A backup that doesn’t run automatically doesn’t run. Schedule it, monitor it, and alert on failure — the difference between a backup plan and a good intention is a timer and a notification.

restic vs Borg vs Kopia: which backup tool — pick the file-level tool by where the backup lands
Automated off-site backups with restic — build copy 3 to Backblaze B2, scheduled and monitored
Proxmox Backup Server in a 3-2-1 layout — copies 2 and 3 for VMs and LXCs, with dedup and verify jobs
Sanoid and Syncoid for ZFS snapshots — the snapshot layer, and the replication that turns it into a backup
Proxmox vs TrueNAS vs Unraid as a storage backend — picking the box these copies live on
Best NAS hard drives — and why they shouldn’t all come from the same batch

Sources

9800X3D Undervolt Guide: Curve Optimizer Done Right

LK Wood IV — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-23 · ~9 min read · St. Louis County, MO

The first X3D chip AMD actually let you tune

For two generations, X3D tuning was only half available. The 5800X3D and 7800X3D stacked 3D V-Cache on top of the compute die, which trapped heat, so AMD locked manual multiplier and voltage control to protect the cache. Curve Optimizer itself was not off-limits — plenty of 7800X3D owners ran PBO with negative offsets — but you could not set a fixed clock above AMD’s boost ceiling.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D removed that last limit. AMD reversed the stack this generation, placing the cache beneath the cores for better heat transfer, and the chip ships with full official overclocking support — as SkatterBencher puts it, “for the first time, the X3D also gets official overclocking support.” So here you get Curve Optimizer and real multiplier and PBO headroom. (If you’re still deciding whether to make the jump, we covered that in 7800X3D vs 9800X3D.)

Decide which outcome you want first

This is where most guides go wrong. Undervolting a 9800X3D does not automatically make it cooler — what the freed headroom becomes depends entirely on your power limits:

The efficiency path. Apply a negative offset and leave the stock limits alone (120W TDP, PPT 162W). The chip needs less voltage for the same clocks, so it draws less power and runs cooler at effectively the same performance. This is what most people actually want.
The performance path. Apply a negative offset and let Precision Boost Overdrive spend the headroom. The chip converts the savings into higher sustained clocks. SkatterBencher measured a -40 all-core offset taking voltage from about 1.13V down to ~0.998V at 5.1 GHz, landing roughly 5,425 MHz all-core and a geomean gain near 4.8% over stock. Temperatures did not fall — they logged 84.6°C average in OCCT, because PBO deliberately spends thermal headroom on frequency.

Pick one before you start. “Undervolted and still hitting 85°C” is not a failure; it means you chose the performance path.

Know your stock numbers

Worth having in front of you. The architecture and clock figures are AMD’s published specs; the Precision Boost 2 limits below are SkatterBencher’s measurements of the stock configuration:

Stock parameter	Value
Cores / architecture	8-core Zen 5, 3D V-Cache
Base / boost clock	4.7 GHz / up to 5.2 GHz
TDP	120W
PPT / TDC / EDC	162W / 120A / 180A
Programmed Fmax	5,250 MHz
Maximum VID	1.40V

Step 1: Baseline before you touch anything

Run a repeatable load for 10–15 minutes and record it. HWiNFO64 alongside your workload is what most tuners use. Note:

Effective clock under sustained all-core load (not the idle boost spike)
Core voltage (VID / SVI) at that load
Package power and peak temperature
A score you can repeat — Cinebench multi-core, or your actual game with a benchmark scene

Without a baseline you can’t tell an improvement from a placebo. For where the chip sits against other CPUs before you tune, the CPU comparison tool and CPU hierarchy give you the stock reference points.

Step 2: Find Curve Optimizer in your BIOS

Curve Optimizer lives under Precision Boost Overdrive, but every vendor buries it slightly differently, and menu names shift between BIOS versions. The usual paths:

ASUS: Ai Tweaker → Precision Boost Overdrive → Curve Optimizer
MSI: OC → Advanced CPU Configuration → AMD Overclocking → Precision Boost Overdrive → Curve Optimizer
Gigabyte: Tweaker → Advanced CPU Settings → AMD Overclocking → PBO → Curve Optimizer
ASRock: OC Tweaker → AMD Overclocking → Precision Boost Overdrive → Curve Optimizer

On most boards you must first set Precision Boost Overdrive to Advanced (or Enabled) before the Curve Optimizer submenu appears. If you’d rather test from Windows first, AMD Ryzen Master exposes the same control — find your value there, then commit it in BIOS so it applies at boot.

Step 3: Set a conservative negative offset

The setting has two parts: a sign (Positive or Negative — you want Negative) and a magnitude (a unit-less number, larger = more aggressive undervolt).

Set sign to Negative, magnitude to 10. Save and reboot.
Test (Step 5). If stable, step the magnitude down by 5 at a time.
Stop one or two steps above your first instability, not at it.

Most owners settle somewhere between -15 and -30. SkatterBencher ran -40 all-core on their sample — good silicon, and part of a full overclocking configuration rather than a daily-driver efficiency profile. Published values are starting points to test, never settings to copy: the entire reason Curve Optimizer exists is that no two chips are identical.

All-core vs per-core. All-core applies one number everywhere and is limited by your weakest core. Per-core lets you push strong cores harder while keeping weak ones stable, which is why experienced tuners increasingly favour it — at the cost of considerably more testing time. Start all-core to get the easy win; move to per-core if you want the last few percent.

Step 4: Only if you want the performance path

If you chose performance rather than efficiency, this is where you spend the headroom. SkatterBencher’s configuration used:

PBO Scalar: 10X — raises the ceiling on how much voltage the chip may request (SkatterBencher’s run moved maximum all-core voltage from roughly 1.35V to about 1.370V). Be clear on what this setting actually does: it relaxes AMD’s silicon reliability target, taking FIT from 1,991.1 to 19,911 in the same measurements — a tenfold increase in the accepted failure-in-time budget. That is a longevity trade, not a free lever.
Max CPU Boost Clock Override: +200 MHz
PBO limits: Motherboard profile

This step is overclocking, not undervolting. AMD classifies Precision Boost Overdrive as an overclocking feature, and overclocking sits outside AMD’s standard processor warranty — check AMD’s current warranty terms before you enable it. A negative Curve Optimizer offset on stock limits is a different proposition; this is the part that carries real cost.

Understand the trade before you apply it: this configuration is what produced ~5,425 MHz all-core and ~4.8% more performance — and 84.6°C in OCCT. You are converting your undervolt into clock speed, not into cooling. Skip this section entirely if lower temperatures were the goal.

Step 5: Test for stability the right way

Curve Optimizer has a genuinely counterintuitive failure mode: an unstable undervolt usually crashes at idle or light load, not under an all-core stress test. When that instability shows up as a blue screen rather than a silent reboot, the stop code is usually CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT — a core that stopped responding, which is exactly what a too-deep offset produces. The reason is where each load sits on the voltage-frequency curve. A sustained all-core load actually runs at a lower voltage — roughly 1.13V at 5.1 GHz on this chip — while light and single-threaded work boosts to the highest clocks at much higher VID, up toward the 1.40V ceiling in the table above. Those light-load, high-frequency points, and the rapid boost transitions around them, are where a too-deep offset leaves a core short. So:

Do run a heavy load (OCCT, Cinebench, Prime95) — it catches thermal and power problems
But also leave the machine idling on the desktop, browsing, and playing normally for a few hours — that’s where an over-aggressive offset shows itself
Watch for random reboots, WHEA errors in Event Viewer, or crashes on wake — all classic signs the offset is too deep
Fix by reducing magnitude by 5 and retesting

A single-core load test (Cinebench single-core, or CoreCycler if you want to be thorough per-core) is more revealing here than an all-core one.

What to expect

Realistically, on the efficiency path most owners report a meaningful drop in load temperatures at effectively unchanged performance — community reports on r/overclocking describe all-core temperatures falling roughly 10°C with the same or slightly better performance. On the performance path, SkatterBencher’s verified figure is the reference: ~4.8% geomean for a -40 offset with PBO pushed.

Neither result is guaranteed on your chip. Silicon lottery is real, your cooler and case airflow set the ceiling, and a board with a weak VRM will limit what’s achievable regardless of offset. For thermal context on what X3D parts should actually be running at, see safe CPU temperatures in 2026.

Worth doing?

For a chip this thermally dense, yes — it’s ten minutes in BIOS for either a cooler, quieter machine or a few percent more performance, with a clean rollback (clear CMOS). Note the split above, though: the undervolt itself is the free part — the Step 4 PBO settings are overclocking, and carry a warranty and longevity trade. It’s the same logic that makes GPU tuning worthwhile on power-limited cards — see how to undervolt your GPU for the graphics-card side, or the RX 9070 XT undervolt guide for a worked example. Just decide which of the two outcomes you’re chasing before you start, and test at idle as seriously as you test under load.

Sources

SkatterBencher — SkatterBencher #82: Ryzen 7 9800X3D Overclocked to 5750 MHz (stock PB2 parameters, Curve Optimizer -40 voltage/frequency results, PBO Scalar and boost-override settings, OCCT temperature and the +4.84% geomean figure) — verified live 2026-07-23
Ryzen 7 9800X3D specifications (8-core Zen 5, 4.7 GHz base / 5.2 GHz boost, 120W TDP, 96MB L3, AM5, second-generation 3D V-Cache with the cache relocated beneath the cores — the change that makes it the first overclockable X3D part) reflect AMD’s published figures, cross-checked across multiple independent launch reviews and corroborated by the stock measurements in the cited SkatterBencher article.
Community-reported undervolt outcomes (typical -15 to -30 offsets, ~10°C load-temperature reductions, per-core preferred over all-core, and the well-documented pattern that Curve Optimizer instability surfaces at idle or light load rather than under an all-core stress test) are drawn from the r/overclocking and r/pcmasterrace AM5 tuning threads and are presented as community consensus, not first-party measurements.

Authelia vs Authentik: Which Self-Hosted SSO (2026)

LK Wood IV — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-23 · Updated 2026-07-23 · ~11 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · The whole SERP is arguing about a stale fact

"Authelia is only forward-auth" is wrong. Authelia has shipped an OpenID Connect provider since v4.29.0 (May 2021) and is OpenID Certified to five profiles. Apps that speak OIDC can use it directly.
But it is still an open beta. Authelia's own roadmap says so, with General Availability not yet started and no single-logout. Certified and beta are both true — every other guide picks one and drops the other.
Authentik no longer needs Redis — removed entirely in 2025.10. The current compose file is three services: PostgreSQL, server, worker. Every guide still listing Redis is out of date.
Ignore the quoted RAM figures. The 30MB-to-1GB spread across other guides comes with no config, no version and no method on any of them. Authelia on a SQLite file is one container, which plausibly explains the low end — but only Authentik publishes a documented minimum (2 CPU / 2GB, for its Compose install). Authelia publishes none.
Authentik's free tier is complete for a homelab. OIDC, SAML, LDAP, SCIM, RADIUS are all open source; Enterprise gates provisioning and compliance, not the protocols.

Versions verified against the GitHub release APIs on 2026-07-23: Authelia v4.39.20, Authentik 2026.5.6. The OIDC beta status is on Authelia's live roadmap; re-check it before you build, because that is the one fact most likely to change.

The short version

Every article ranking for this comparison repeats the same personality sketch: Authelia is the light, simple one; Authentik is the heavy, powerful one. That sketch is not wrong, but it is built on top of a fact that stopped being true five years ago, and the whole search result has been copying it forward ever since.

The stale fact is this: Authelia is described as a forward-auth gateway that cannot be a real identity provider. One of the pages currently ranking states flatly that Authelia cannot issue OAuth2 or OIDC tokens at all. It can, it has since 2021, and it is certified. So the useful version of this comparison starts by getting that straight, because it changes who each tool is actually for.

The correction: Authelia is an OIDC provider — and still a beta

Authelia’s documentation says it plainly: “Authelia can act as an [OpenID Connect 1.0] Provider as part of an open beta” (OIDC introduction). This is not a forward-auth trick with headers — it is the real thing. Applications that implement the OIDC relying-party role “can use Authelia as an [OpenID Connect 1.0] Provider similar to how you may use social media or development platforms for login” (provider config).

It is also independently verified. Authelia “is [OpenID Certified™] to the Basic OP / Implicit OP / Hybrid OP / Form Post OP / Config OP profiles” (OIDC introduction). That certification is why the pages calling Authelia “not a real IdP” are simply wrong.

Here is the part no page on the first page of Google states, and it is the whole story: certified and beta are true at the same time. Authelia’s roadmap is explicit — “we have decided to implement [OAuth 2.0] and [OpenID Connect 1.0] as a beta feature. While it’s relatively stable there may inevitably be the occasional breaking change,” and the endpoints “are not enabled by default” (OIDC roadmap). The provider first shipped in v4.29.0, which the GitHub release API dates to 2021-05-05 (release). The roadmap tracks it through numbered beta stages, with General Availability defined as a future stage that “will signify official stability guarantees” and has no version attached yet.

So one set of articles tells you Authelia can’t do OIDC (false), and another tells you it’s certified and therefore production-ready (an overstatement). The accurate statement is the paradox: Authelia’s OIDC provider is OpenID Certified and officially still an open beta, off by default, with occasional breaking changes possible.

The two facts stop fighting once you know what certification actually measures. OpenID Certification tests protocol conformance — that an implementation correctly speaks the spec’s profiles. It says nothing about a project’s own stability commitments, which is what a beta label governs. Authelia’s provider conforms to the specification and carries no stability guarantee, at the same time, without contradiction. That is why quoting only the certification or only the beta tag both mislead.

If you run a handful of apps, can absorb an occasional breaking change at upgrade time, and do not need centralized sign-out, that trade is usually fine. If you need a stability guarantee in writing, it is not there yet.

The clearest gap in Authelia’s provider: single logout

The beta status carries three separate costs — the provider is off until you configure it, breaking changes are possible at upgrade time, and one capability is missing outright. The missing capability is the most concrete of the three, and the sharpest reason to pick Authentik instead. Authelia’s OIDC support chart marks RP-Initiated Logout, Session Management, Front-Channel Logout and Back-Channel Logout all as unsupported (OIDC introduction), and the roadmap places them in a later beta stage that has not started.

In practice: logging out of one application does not sign you out of the others. Each app’s session lives until it expires on its own. For a home setup with a handful of trusted users who close their own browser sessions, that is usually acceptable; if you share access with people who will not, or you need a revoked account to lose access everywhere immediately, it is not. For anything where a real single sign-out matters, it is a genuine limitation, and Authentik’s provider implements front-channel and back-channel logout (Authentik logout docs) where Authelia’s does not. None of the six ranking comparisons we reviewed on 2026-07-21 mentions it — it is the highest-value operational detail on the page.

Authentik: the fuller provider that quietly dropped Redis

Authentik is the broader tool, and its documented architecture is simpler than its reputation. A standard deployment is the server container (which bundles the Core plus an embedded outpost), the worker container, and PostgreSQL (architecture). The current official Docker Compose file defines exactly three services — postgresql, server and worker — plus one volume, and pins the 2026.5.6 image (compose file).

Note what is missing: Redis. Authentik removed it entirely. Caching, the embedded outpost session store and WebSockets all moved to PostgreSQL in release 2025.10, after background tasks moved there in 2025.8 (2025.10 release notes). This matters for the comparison because nearly every third-party writeup — and any AI summary trained before late 2025 — still lists Redis as a hard Authentik dependency. It is not one anymore. The documented trade is roughly 50% more PostgreSQL connections, and a 2026.5 change to a Rust-based worker cut about 200MB of memory per worker container on top of that (2026.5 release notes).

The current stable release is 2026.5.6, published 2026-07-22 (release API). Two upgrade hazards are worth knowing before you commit: Authentik does not support downgrades, and major-version upgrades must be done sequentially — you cannot jump an old install straight to current. Outpost containers, if you run separate ones, must match the server version exactly (upgrade docs).

Footprint: the number everyone quotes and nobody explains

The resource figures across the ranking pages are a mess — Authelia is quoted anywhere from sub-30MB to over 1GB of idle RAM, a tenfold spread for the same product, with no page reconciling it. Before trusting any of them, note what none of those pages provide: not one publishes a config file, a docker stats output, a version, or even whether the figure is idle or under load. They are unsourced numbers.

What we can state from primary docs is the mechanism that most likely explains the spread. Authelia can use SQLite as a file-based embedded backend that needs no separate database server (storage docs). Configured that way it is a single container with a single config file. The same storage doc is candid that SQLite leaves Authelia stateful and steers production and high-availability deployments to PostgreSQL, so the one-container shape is a small-deployment convenience, not a recommended ceiling. Point it at LDAP and other services and the container count and memory climb. So a 30MB figure and a 300MB figure can plausibly both be honest — different deployments rather than different measurements of one thing. We cannot prove that mapping for any specific published figure, because none of them disclose their configuration. Treat the range as a range, and measure your own.

The documented-requirements comparison is cleaner, and it cuts one way: Authentik publishes a minimum and Authelia publishes none. Authentik’s install docs state “2 CPU cores” and “2 GB of RAM” for the Docker Compose deployment (install docs) — scoped to that install path rather than a global floor, and cited by not one ranking page. Authelia’s docs carry no hardware requirements page at all, so its low numbers are community reports, not specification. If you are sizing the machine, our mini PC picks for a home server apply; on a Pi-class board Authentik’s documented 2GB is the constraint to plan around.

What actually costs money in Authentik

Authentik has a paid Enterprise tier, and the ranking pages that mention it name at most a feature or two, leaving a vague impression that “the good stuff is paywalled.” The docs are specific, so we can be too.

The Open Source (free) tier covers OIDC, SAML, LDAP, SCIM, RADIUS, Kerberos and the Proxy/forward-auth outpost, plus browser-based RDP and SSH via RAC — the only listed exclusion is vendor support (pricing). Enterprise, at a documented “$5 / user / month” billed annually, gates ten features on its own published list — enhanced audit logging, viewing and exporting logs, Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra ID provisioning, embedding external OAuth/SAML sources, Chrome Enterprise Device Trust, the Shared Signals Framework, password-history compliance checks, and mTLS client certificates (enterprise features, pricing). Three further gates are announced in release notes rather than on that list, and this is worth knowing because their own provider pages carry no Enterprise badge: WS-Federation (2026.2), SCIM OAuth-token authentication (SCIM provider) and RADIUS EAP-TLS (2025.10). A couple of details cut the other way: base RADIUS with PAP is free (only EAP-TLS is Enterprise), base SCIM with a static token is free (only OAuth-token mode is Enterprise), and the served LDAP directory carries no Enterprise marker at all.

The takeaway for a homelab reader: the free tier is complete. Every authentication protocol you would want is open source. What you pay for is outbound provisioning into corporate directories and a set of compliance features — the things a business needs and a home lab does not.

What the community actually says

Across the r/selfhosted threads on this matchup (community sentiment, not verified fact, read via a mirror on 2026-07-21), the split is consistent and it is not about capability. The most-cited decider is configuration style: Authelia’s single declarative YAML file versus Authentik’s clicked-together GUI. People who ran both tend to land on one honest line — Authentik is more capable, Authelia is easier.

Resource use is the most repeated concrete complaint, and it runs one direction: Authentik’s multi-container stack near 1GB idle versus an Authelia instance a small fraction of that. Two migration patterns show up. People leave Authentik for Authelia to cut resource use and shrink the attack surface, often pairing Authelia with LLDAP for a single-file backup story. People leave Authelia for Authentik when they tire of hand-editing config and want a GUI, per-user self-service password reset (which Authelia plus LLDAP does not offer end users), and a maintained app-integration catalog.

One migration gotcha deserves a callout because vendor docs gloss it: OIDC apps key each account to the issuer plus the identity provider’s opaque sub claim, so switching IdPs changes every user’s sub and can strand existing app-side accounts. There is no clean user-export path between the two; the durable answer people land on is to put users in an external LDAP so the IdP only does authentication and the next migration is painless. If you are choosing now, choosing an external directory early is the move that saves you later.

Run Authelia if / run Authentik if

Run Authelia if a light single-container deployment covers your needs, you prefer one declarative config file you can version-control and back up as a single artifact, and your apps either sit behind a reverse proxy for forward-auth or speak OIDC natively. Accept the trade: the OIDC provider is a certified beta, and there is no single sign-out yet. (If footprint is the only thing you care about, note that the community increasingly points at even lighter single-purpose tools like Pocket ID or Tinyauth — neither is a full IdP, but neither pretends to be.) If you already run a reverse proxy, our Caddy vs Nginx Proxy Manager vs Traefik comparison covers the layer Authelia’s forward-auth sits behind.

Run Authentik if you want a web GUI over YAML, the widest protocol coverage — including a served LDAP directory and RADIUS, not just LDAP as a login backend — self-service password reset for non-technical users, or working single logout. Budget 2GB of RAM for it, and if you are standing it up, our Authentik SSO setup guide walks the deployment end to end.

Whichever you pick, an auth server is the front door to everything else you self-host, so it belongs in your backup rotation from day one — encrypted offsite copies via restic are the minimum bar, and a self-hosted password manager like Vaultwarden pairs naturally with either behind SSO.

What competing guides skip (our angle)

Four things almost never make it into other comparisons, and they are the four that actually decide it.

First, the certified-and-beta paradox. The SERP is split between pages saying Authelia can’t do OIDC (false) and pages calling it production-ready (incomplete). The accurate statement is both: OpenID Certified and officially an open beta, off by default. Stating only half misroutes readers in both directions.

Second, the single-logout gap. Authelia’s provider does not implement RP-initiated or channel logout yet, so signing out of one app leaves the others signed in. It is the clearest capability reason to choose Authentik, and no ranking page names it.

Third, Authentik dropped Redis. Removed in 2025.10; the current stack is three services. Every guide still listing Redis is describing a 2025-and-earlier Authentik.

Fourth, the resource figures on this SERP are unsourced. Not one of the six ranking pages discloses a config, a version, or an idle-versus-load distinction behind its RAM numbers, which is why the same product is quoted across a tenfold range. The documented comparison is the one worth having: Authentik states 2 CPU and 2GB for its Compose install, Authelia publishes no hardware requirements at all, and no ranking page reports either fact.

Authentik SSO: self-hosted setup guide — the step-by-step deployment for the heavier of the two
Vaultwarden vs Bitwarden — the password manager to put behind your new SSO
Caddy vs Nginx Proxy Manager vs Traefik — the reverse proxy Authelia’s forward-auth sits behind
Tailscale vs Cloudflare Tunnel — how people reach these services from outside the LAN
Automated offsite backups with restic — because an auth server belongs in your backups

Sources

Jellyfin vs Emby: What Free Actually Gets You (2026)

LK Wood IV — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-23 · Updated 2026-07-23 · ~12 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · Shared ancestry, client-dependent freemium

They share a codebase, and have diverged for eight years since. Jellyfin forked Emby 3.5.2 in December 2018 after Emby took 4.x closed-source. Emby's public repo stops dead in September 2018 at tag 3.5.3.
"Free Emby" depends on which client you open. Full playback is free in a web browser and on Roku/Apple TV/LG/Samsung TVs. The native iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and macOS apps stop after one minute. Live TV needs Premiere everywhere.
Hardware transcoding is a Premiere feature (Nvidia Shield and WD NAS excepted). Jellyfin gates nothing — QuickSync, NVENC, AMF, VA-API and more are plain settings.
Premiere in 2026: $4.99/mo, $54/yr, or $119 lifetime — single household, 30 devices, counted per app rather than per machine.
Migration is officially unsupported. Jellyfin's docs say so in capitals. Your files and sidecar metadata survive; your watch history and users do not.

Versions verified against the projects' own release feeds on 2026-07-23: Jellyfin 10.11.11 stable (12.0 is still release-candidate), Emby Server 4.9.5.0. Emby's prices and feature matrix move — re-check the linked pages before you buy.

The short version

Most comparisons of these two open on personality — Jellyfin is the free community one, Emby is the polished paid one — and stop there. That framing is not wrong, but it skips the two things that actually decide it: what the free tier of Emby does and does not let you do, and the fact that these are not two products that happen to be similar. They are one product that split.

Get the split straight and the rest follows.

Jellyfin’s own documentation is direct about the origin: the project “was started in early December 2018 primarily as a result of Emby’s decision to take their next release (4.x) closed-source” (about). On that announcement, the group “quickly gathered to fork as many repositories as (legally) possible and begin the process of renaming the project Jellyfin.”

The precise lineage matters, and almost nobody states it correctly: Jellyfin descends from Emby 3.5.2, not from 4.x, and was “ported to the .NET Core framework to enable full cross-platform support” (about). Jellyfin also cites reasons beyond the licence change — previously-reported GPL violations, a paywall added for gratis users in an early 3.x release, and the progressive removal of client and server source code.

Emby confirms the same event from its own side. Its developer blog states that “in 2018, Emby made a significant decision: it moved from being an open-source project to a proprietary, closed-source model” (Emby history). The hard corroboration is the repository itself: Emby’s public server repo is GPL-2.0 licensed, and its final commit is dated September 2018, tagged 3.5.3 (MediaBrowser/Emby). No source for 3.6 or any 4.x release was ever published.

So the two projects diverged from adjacent commits. That shared ancestry explains a great deal of what follows — including a port collision nobody warns you about.

What “free Emby” actually means

This is the part the search results get wrong, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. Emby is free to install, and every comparison says so. What none of them say is that the free tier’s limits depend entirely on which screen you watch on.

From Emby’s own Premiere Feature Matrix (feature matrix):

Client	Free tier	Needs Premiere
PC or mobile web browser	Full playback	Live TV, TV Mode
Roku, Apple TV, LG & Samsung smart TVs	Full playback	Live TV only
Android TV, Fire TV	Full playback, capped at 5 TV devices	Live TV, offline media
iOS, Android (native apps)	One-minute playback only	Full playback (or a one-off per-app purchase), offline downloads, CarPlay/Android Auto, Apple Watch, camera upload
Windows, Linux, macOS (native apps)	One-minute playback only	Full playback, Live TV, offline media (listed for Windows and macOS; the Linux row lists none)

Read the first row, because it is the one no competing page mentions: the web browser is a fully unrestricted free client for playback. Your whole library, no licence, no time limit. Live TV and TV Mode are the only things it withholds — and Live TV is Premiere-gated on every client, so that is not a browser limitation.

The cap lands on the native apps. Open Emby’s iOS, Android, Windows, Linux or macOS application unlicensed and playback stops after one minute. Emby sells a per-app purchase that buys full playback on that one app, or Premiere covers everything at once.

So “free Emby” is a real, usable product — provided you watch in a browser tab or on a TV. What Premiere buys on a phone or desktop is the native app experience, offline downloads and Live TV on those clients. That is a defensible model, and considerably more nuanced than either “Emby is free” or “Emby is crippled.”

Jellyfin has no equivalent table, because it has no tiers. Its docs put it plainly: “There are no strings attached, no premium licenses or features, and no hidden agendas” (about), and the project has committed that features “will never be hidden behind a paywall” (10.6.0 release post).

Hardware transcoding is the expensive difference

Everything above is about convenience. This one is about whether your hardware copes.

Emby’s feature matrix lists hardware accelerated transcoding as a Premiere feature, with a footnoted exception: Nvidia Shield and WD NAS devices do not require Premiere for it. Everyone else transcodes in software until they pay.

Jellyfin documents hardware acceleration as a plain configuration option for all users, listing Intel QuickSync, NVIDIA NVDEC/NVENC, AMD AMF, Intel/AMD VA-API on Linux, Apple VideoToolbox on macOS, and Rockchip RKMPP (hardware acceleration). One honest scope note: Jellyfin documents full acceleration for a specific list — mainstream Intel and NVIDIA GPUs on Windows and Linux, AMD Polaris and newer on Linux, older AMD on Windows, RK3588, and Intel and Apple Silicon on macOS 12+. And it requires its own bundled FFmpeg: “using FFmpeg binaries downloaded from somewhere else will result in partial acceleration.”

If you run a low-power box — an N100 mini PC, a Pi-class board, an older NAS — this is the whole comparison. Software transcoding is what makes cheap servers stutter, and one product charges to avoid it. If you are choosing hardware around this, our GPU picks for Plex and Jellyfin transcoding cover what actually accelerates.

About that viral “Emby transcoding is 3x slower” thread

If you have researched this comparison, you have probably seen a thread on Emby’s own community forum titled roughly why is Emby’s transcoding engine so far behind Jellyfin, and why I’m switching back, claiming Jellyfin hits ~80 fps where Emby manages ~30. It surfaces high in search precisely because it sits on Emby’s own turf.

We read the whole thread, and its own contents defeat the claim. One problem is disqualifying on its own; the rest is context:

It is self-refuting. The author’s own description establishes that Emby was performing a software transcode while Jellyfin used the GPU. That is a software-versus-hardware measurement, not an engine-efficiency comparison.
There is a confound that explains it entirely. As a forum contributor pointed out and Emby’s docs confirm, hardware transcoding requires Premiere outside the Nvidia Shield and WD NAS exception. The author never stated whether the Emby install was licensed — and without a licence it could not have used the GPU at all.
Context worth knowing, though it does not by itself refute a measurement: the post is not first-hand text. A responder flagged it as machine-generated and the author conceded it — “My English is not good, so I let AI help me express what I mean.” An Emby administrator rejected the post’s accuracy and requested diagnostics; the author never supplied any, and the thread died without resolution.

There is exactly one narrow corroboration: a later commenter reported that on Rockchip RK3588 hardware, “jellyfin hw transcodes 4k to 4k HEVC at 4.8x. Emby won’t even let me do this on rk3588.” That is one unverified single report, but it is at least consistent with something documented — see the next section.

We are flagging this because it is widely linked and worthless as a benchmark. Anyone repeating the fps figures is repeating an AI-written post that Emby staff rejected and nobody ever reproduced.

What is actually documented about transcoding

Discarding that thread leaves the performance question open — no public benchmark we found settles it. What we can document is not a performance result but a difference in release cadence, which is a narrower claim and worth stating as such.

Jellyfin does not use system FFmpeg. It ships and requires jellyfin-ffmpeg, its own maintained fork. Be precise about what that means today: the current stable build is v7.1.4-3 (2026-06-06), which is what stable Jellyfin 10.11.x installs. The fork’s 8.1.x line — v8.1.2-2 as of 2026-07-21 — is still flagged pre-release and pairs with the Jellyfin 12.0 release candidates (jellyfin-ffmpeg releases). That fork carries patches that matter for exactly the workloads people complain about: PGS and graphical subtitle overlay moved into hardware filters so subtitle burn-in stays on the GPU, hardware HDR tone-mapping across four vendor stacks, and a documented end-to-end hardware pipeline for Rockchip RK3588 — which is precisely the case the one corroborating commenter hit.

Emby also maintains its own patched FFmpeg fork rather than shipping stale vanilla binaries. But its announced base version lags: the last Emby release announcing an FFmpeg base upgrade is 4.7.0.60, dated 2022-05-17 (“Update to ffmpeg 5.0”), and no Emby release note we could find since then — through the 4.10.0.20 beta of 2026-07-17 — announces a further base bump (Emby releases). Emby backports fixes into its own fork, so the announced base version understates how current the shipped code actually is. Treat this as a base-version lag, not abandonment.

The fair summary: Jellyfin adopts new upstream FFmpeg capability faster. That is a documented difference in release cadence, not a measured performance gap, and we are not aware of a controlled benchmark that turns one into the other. On mainstream Intel or NVIDIA hardware, both products lean on the same vendor APIs and you are unlikely to see a difference. The one concrete case in evidence is Rockchip RK3588, where jellyfin-ffmpeg documents an end-to-end hardware pipeline and a user reported Emby would not hardware-transcode at all.

Two practical traps from the shared ancestry

They collide on the same ports. Jellyfin documents TCP 8096 for HTTP, TCP 8920 for HTTPS and UDP 7359 for LAN discovery. Emby’s connectivity documentation specifies the identical three. Both inherited them from the 3.5.2 fork point (Jellyfin networking, Emby connectivity). Install both on one host to compare them and the second fails to bind. Across the top-10 Google results for “jellyfin vs emby” that we checked on 2026-07-23, none mentions a port number at all.

Migration is officially unsupported. One competing guide tells readers that moving between these servers is straightforward because they read the same file structures. Jellyfin’s own migration doc contradicts it in capitals: “Direct database migration from Emby (of any version) to Jellyfin is NOT SUPPORTED” (migrate). It goes further and advises against migrating even Emby 3.5.2-era configuration — the one version the shared lineage would theoretically permit — “due to subtle and weird bugs reported after such attempts.”

The half-truth in the competing claim is that your media and any NFO and image sidecar files do carry over, because they live beside the files. What does not carry over is the database: watch history, user accounts, playback positions and server settings. Plan on a fresh library scan.

One more thing worth knowing before you buy

Emby Premiere requires online licence validation, and not only from the server. Emby documents that “each of your devices will need access to the internet and, specifically, mb3admin.com in order to validate the limit” (Premiere limits), and the server itself must reach the same host or the key reports as invalid.

The 30-device limit is contractual and counted per unique device ID per application, so one physical machine can consume several slots (Premiere terms). Premiere is keyed to the server rather than to a user account, and the device limit is counted per key across every server that key is used on.

If a fully offline or air-gapped setup is a requirement, that is the constraint to weigh. We found no Emby documentation describing offline activation. Jellyfin has nothing to validate.

Run Jellyfin if / run Emby if

Run Jellyfin if you want everything free with nothing gated, you want GPU transcoding without a subscription on hardware outside Emby’s Shield/WD-NAS exemption, you run newer or ARM-based silicon where FFmpeg cadence matters, or you simply want no licence server in the path. Accept the trade: client polish is uneven and you may end up pairing it with a third-party player on some platforms. Our Jellyfin Docker setup guide covers the build.

Run Emby free if your household watches your own library in a browser or on Roku, Apple TV or a Samsung/LG TV. Playback there is unrestricted and costs nothing — a genuinely viable setup that most comparisons write off.

Buy Emby Premiere if you additionally want Live TV, offline downloads, the native phone and desktop apps without the one-minute cap, or hardware transcoding on anything other than an Nvidia Shield or WD NAS (which are exempt). At $119 once, that is a real product for a real user, and the polish is not imaginary.

And if you have not committed to either, note that most of this decision is upstream of both: our Jellyfin vs Plex comparison covers the third option most people are actually choosing between, and the box matters more than the software — see the best NAS for Plex and Jellyfin.

What competing guides skip (our angle)

Five things — three that change which product you pick, two that change how you deploy it.

First, the free tier is client-dependent. Full playback free in a web browser and on TV apps; one minute in the native phone and desktop apps; Live TV behind Premiere everywhere. Across the top-10 results we checked on 2026-07-23, none published that split — and it is the difference between “free Emby works” and “free Emby is a demo.”

Second, the fork lineage is specific, and none of the pages we checked states it. Emby 3.5.2, December 2018, ported to .NET Core. Emby’s own repo stopping at 3.5.3 in September 2018 is the corroboration from the other side.

Third, the most-cited performance evidence is worthless. The viral Emby-forum thread is AI-written, self-refuting on its own description, and was rejected by Emby staff. The real difference is FFmpeg release cadence, which is a narrower and more honest claim.

Fourth, migration is officially unsupported, in capitals, in Jellyfin’s own docs — directly contradicting the one ranking page that addresses migration at all.

Fifth, they share default ports and collide on a single host, because they share an ancestor. None of the pages we checked mentions a port number.

Jellyfin vs Plex (2026) — the comparison most people actually need first
Jellyfin setup with Docker — the build, end to end
Best NAS for Plex and Jellyfin — the hardware that decides transcoding
Best GPU for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding — what actually accelerates
Best mini PC for a home server — sizing a low-power box

Sources

Tailscale vs Cloudflare Tunnel for Homelab (2026)

LK Wood IV — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-22 · Updated 2026-07-22 · ~10 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · They overlap, but they are built for different jobs

Publishing a service to people who should not need an account or client? Cloudflare Tunnel. A plain HTTPS URL in any browser, no software on the far end — but put a Cloudflare Access policy in front of it unless you genuinely intend the service to be public. A tunnel with no policy is a public URL.
Reaching your own machines privately? Tailscale. End-to-end WireGuard, any protocol, any port, no domain required.
Who holds plaintext: Cloudflare states it must decrypt traffic to cache and filter it; Tailscale's relays never access unencrypted data.
Neither opens inbound ports, and both survive CGNAT — that shared property is why the comparison exists at all.
If you have both needs, run both: public apps via the Tunnel, admin and SSH via Tailscale. If everything you reach is your own, Tailscale alone is enough — and if you publish one public app and administer nothing remotely, so is the Tunnel.

Free-tier terms and product limits move. Every number below is cited to a source we read live on 2026-07-20 — re-check the linked page before you plan around it.

The short version

Most comparisons treat Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnel as competitors picking off the same job. They aren’t. Ask one question first: are you publishing a service to people who should not need an account or client software, or are you reaching your own machines privately? If it’s the first, Cloudflare Tunnel is the tool — an unmodified browser hits a normal HTTPS hostname and Cloudflare Access decides who gets through. If it’s the second, Tailscale is the tool — every device runs a client, traffic is end-to-end WireGuard, and every protocol works because you are on a network, not behind a web proxy.

They overlap on exactly one property, and that overlap is what makes people compare them: neither requires an inbound port on your router. cloudflared “initiates an outbound connection through your firewall from the origin to the Cloudflare global network” (Cloudflare Tunnel docs), and Tailscale connections work across firewalls and NAT “without requiring port forwarding or complex firewall rules” (What is Tailscale). Everything past that point diverges.

Side by side, from the vendors’ own docs

Dimension	Cloudflare Tunnel	Tailscale
Inbound ports on your router	None — outbound-only connector	None — NAT traversal, no port forwarding
Client on the accessing device	None for HTTP/HTTPS; required (cloudflared or the Cloudflare One client) for TCP/SSH/RDP	Required on every device, unless reached via a subnet router
Encryption model	TLS terminated at Cloudflare’s edge; Cloudflare decrypts to cache and filter	End-to-end WireGuard; relays only carry already-encrypted packets
Public clientless web access	A plain HTTPS URL — pair with an Access policy	Via Funnel (public, ports 443, 8443, 10000 only)
Private access for invited people	Access policy + IdP or email OTP	Add them to the tailnet; they install a client
Built-in auth	Cloudflare Access, deny-by-default; email one-time PIN needs no third-party IdP	Tailnet policy file ACLs — but new tailnets default to allow-all
Free tier (checked 2026-07-20)	$0 forever, 50-user limit, logs up to 24 hours	$0 forever, up to 6 users, unlimited user devices
Domain required	Yes — you must add a website to Cloudflare	No — MagicDNS / ts.net name
Large uploads	100 MB body on Free and Pro, 200 MB Business	Not capped by that mechanism; Funnel has undisclosed bandwidth limits
Whole-LAN access	Private network routes plus a client on-ramp	Subnet router; exit node for full-tunnel

Who can decrypt your traffic

This is the sharpest differentiator and the one most comparisons bury under a feature grid.

Cloudflare is a reverse proxy. Its SSL FAQ says it plainly: “Cloudflare must decrypt traffic in order to cache and filter malicious traffic. Cloudflare either re-encrypts traffic or sends plain text traffic to the origin web server depending on your domain’s encryption mode” (SSL FAQ). The architecture is two separate TLS legs with two certificates — an edge certificate presented to visitors, and an origin certificate covering the Cloudflare-to-origin hop (SSL concepts). Under Flexible mode, “traffic from visitors to Cloudflare can be encrypted via HTTPS, but traffic from Cloudflare to the origin server is not” (SSL modes). Cloudflare does not publish a Tunnel-specific page stating it terminates TLS for tunnel traffic in those words, so treat this as what the reverse-proxy architecture implies rather than a Tunnel-page quote.

Tailscale goes the other way. Its data plane “uses WireGuard as its primary mechanism to encrypt communication between Tailscale devices,” and it provides end-to-end encryption “whether devices connect directly or through a relayed connection” (Tailscale encryption). Relays are explicitly blind: “DERP servers never access your unencrypted data; they only handle WireGuard packets that are already encrypted.” Policy enforcement is local too — ACLs are enforced “on each device directly, without further involvement from Tailscale’s coordination server” (ACLs).

Neither position is the safe one in the abstract. Cloudflare’s decryption is what buys you WAF, bot filtering, and Access policies evaluated before a packet reaches your origin. Tailscale’s refusal to decrypt is what forces client software onto every participant. That is the trade, stated honestly.

One caveat worth knowing: Tailscale Funnel is the exception that proves the rule. When you publish a service publicly with Funnel, “the Tailscale server running on your device receives the encrypted request from the TCP proxy. It then terminates the TLS connection and passes the decrypted request to the local service” (Funnel). TLS ends on your hardware, not Tailscale’s.

Protocol coverage: HTTP-first vs anything

Cloudflare Tunnel “can connect HTTP web servers, SSH servers, remote desktops, and other protocols,” and has full WebSocket support (Tunnel docs, Tunnel FAQ). The catch homelabbers hit is how those non-HTTP protocols are reached. For arbitrary TCP, “cloudflared will need to be installed on each user device that will connect” (arbitrary TCP). For private network routes — the CIDR-style path that exposes non-HTTP resources — “end users must connect their device to Cloudflare and enroll in your Zero Trust organization,” most commonly by installing the Cloudflare One Client (private networks).

SSH has four documented paths: client-side cloudflared (no Cloudflare One client needed), Access for Infrastructure and self-managed SSH keys (both requiring a client on-ramp), and a browser-rendered terminal that needs no SSH client at all (SSH use case). RDP mirrors this with browser-based, Cloudflare One client, and client-side cloudflared options (RDP use case).

The net: HTTP/HTTPS is the only category an arbitrary unmodified browser reaches. Everything else needs client software or Cloudflare’s browser-rendered terminal. On Tailscale, once the client is installed, there is nothing to configure per-protocol — SMB, NFS, rsync, a game server, a database port, whatever. That is the practical meaning of “network” versus “web proxy,” and it’s the same distinction we draw in Tailscale vs WireGuard.

The client requirement and its escape hatches

Tailscale’s own subnet-router page states the constraint outright: subnet routers exist to “extend your Tailscale network to include devices that don’t or can’t run the Tailscale client,” citing printers and large VPC or legacy environments where “installing clients on every endpoint becomes impractical” (subnets). Routes must be approved in the admin console or auto-approved via autoApprovers, and there is a failure mode worth planning around: “Tailscale does not fall back to a less-specific route when the subnet router for a more-specific route goes offline.”

Exit nodes are the other lever — one device routes all your public internet traffic using default routes 0.0.0.0/0 and ::/0, which requires IP forwarding on Linux and explicit opt-in on both ends. Tailscale flags real platform limits here: macOS exit nodes are “limited to userspace routing” and need sleep prevention to hold a connection, Windows carries its own caveat around per-query DNS thread usage, and “running an exit node on an Android device is not performant” (exit nodes).

Cloudflare’s escape hatch from the domain requirement doesn’t exist: “Before you publish an application through your tunnel, you must add a website to Cloudflare” (create a remote tunnel). If you don’t own a domain and don’t want to, that ends the conversation.

Auth, and one default that surprises people

Before anything else in this section: a Cloudflare Tunnel does not authenticate anyone by itself. Access is a separate product you put in front of it. Publish a hostname through a tunnel with no Access policy and no application-level login, and you have put that service on the public internet — indexed, scanned, and reachable by anyone who learns the name. This is the single most common way homelabs get burned by the “no client needed” pitch, and it is why the clientless convenience is not free. Before you point anything at a tunnel, decide explicitly whether it is meant to be public; if it is not, attach an Access policy or make sure the app’s own authentication is one you would trust facing the open internet. Admin surfaces — Proxmox, routers, Portainer, container dashboards — should not be published this way at all. Put those on the tailnet.

Cloudflare Access is deny-by-default and validates identity against an IdP (Access policies). You do not need a third-party IdP for a homelab: Access can send a one-time PIN to approved email addresses instead. The PIN expires 10 minutes after request, is single-use, and requesting a new one invalidates the previous — and Cloudflare only sends the email if the user is already allowed by a policy (one-time PIN).

Tailscale’s ACL system is deny-by-default in principle, but new tailnets are not: “When you first create your tailnet, the default tailnet policy file enables communication between all devices within the tailnet,” and “in the absence of an acls section in the tailnet policy file, Tailscale applies the default allow all policy” (ACLs). If you have added a family member’s laptop or a VPS to your tailnet and never touched the policy file, every node can reach every other node on every port. Fixing that is a 20-minute job and it’s the first thing we do in our Tailscale homelab setup guide.

Free tiers, as verified on 2026-07-20

Cloudflare’s Zero Trust free plan reads “$0” “forever,” a “50 user limit,” “Community forums and Discord server” support, and standard log retention “up to 24 hours”; the next tier is pay-as-you-go at “$7 per user/month (paid annually)” with logs “up to 30 days” (Access plans, Zero Trust plans). Note the annual-billing qualifier on that $7 — monthly billing is higher. Onboarding still asks for payment details — Cloudflare notes that if you chose the Free plan “this step is still needed but you will not be charged” (Cloudflare One setup). Free-plan DEX limits are 10 tests per account and 100 remote captures per day (account limits).

Tailscale’s Personal plan currently reads “$0 / Free forever,” “Up to 6 users,” “Unlimited user devices,” up to 3 ACL groups, “Up to 50 tagged resources to start,” and 1,000 minutes per month for ephemeral resources, with subnet routers, exit nodes, and Funnel included (Tailscale pricing). Note this supersedes the 3-user / 100-device figures still repeated across older comparisons — those are stale.

Seat accounting on Cloudflare is worth reading before you invite people: “A user consumes a seat when they perform an authentication event,” one seat regardless of how many apps they open, and once seats are exhausted “additional users who attempt to log in are blocked” (seat management). Whether a tunnel with no Access policy in front of it consumes a seat is not stated in the docs we read — treat it as unverified.

The two limits that actually bite homelabs

The 100 MB body cap. Maximum upload size is 100 MB on Free and Pro, 200 MB on Business, and 500+ MB on Enterprise; exceeding it returns 413 Request Entity Too Large. Documented workarounds are chunking requests, switching the DNS record to DNS-only, or upgrading (error 413). Immich and Nextcloud users hit this constantly.

The CDN media term. Cloudflare’s service-specific terms state it “reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN… if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files,” naming the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream as the qualifying paid services (service-specific terms). That is the text; we found no published enforcement threshold anywhere in Cloudflare’s terms, so any specific TB/month figure you see quoted is anecdote, not policy. This is why Plex and Jellyfin over a Tunnel is a recurring warning in self-hosting communities.

We could not verify a bandwidth cap for Cloudflare Tunnel itself, and Tailscale states only that Funnel traffic “is subject to non-configurable bandwidth limits” without publishing a number. Don’t plan capacity on either.

The split most people actually run

Across three self-hosting and homelab threads we read on 2026-07-20 (community opinion, not verified fact), the dominant recommendation among people who have both needs is not a winner — it’s a division of labor. That is a statement about what experienced self-hosters recommend in those threads, not a claim that most homelabs run both; plenty need only one. A highly-upvoted framing in the r/selfhosted Cloudflare-Tunnels-vs-Tailscale thread splits the estate into applications you consume (website, wiki, photo management) behind Cloudflare, and management planes (Proxmox, terminal, remote desktop, Portainer) behind Tailscale. Since neither opens inbound ports, the argument runs, the real difference is that one path demands a client on the far end and the other only demands authentication. The identical split appears independently in a separate r/selfhosted thread, with replies naming the exact division: Overseerr and Mealie public via Tunnel, Portainer private via Tailscale. Vote rankings drift, so treat “highly-upvoted” as a snapshot of that date, not a standing fact.

Credential stores are the clearest case of all. A self-hosted password manager is the last thing to publish through a proxy that terminates TLS — keep Vaultwarden on the tailnet and reachable only by devices you control, whatever you do with the rest of the estate.

The recurring tiebreaker is blunt: can you install a client on the accessing device? Work laptops, a partner’s phone, a friend’s browser — those push you to the Tunnel. Second is household UX: toggling a VPN is friction for non-technical family, though the counter-argument in-thread is that Tailscale can simply be left running. Third is CGNAT, which even WireGuard purists concede is where Tailscale earns its place.

If you go the both-tools route, the public side still needs a reverse proxy behind cloudflared for host-based routing; our Caddy vs Nginx Proxy Manager vs Traefik comparison covers that layer.

What competing guides skip (our angle)

Four things get consistently glossed over:

They are not the same category. Cloudflare Tunnel publishes a service; Tailscale joins a network. Comparing their properties side by side is fine — we do it above — but scoring them on a shared grid and declaring a winner is the framing error, because half the rows are measuring each tool against a job it was never built to do. Tailscale’s public-publishing answer is Funnel, which is restricted to ports 443, 8443, and 10000 and requires MagicDNS plus tailnet HTTPS certificates (Funnel); its private equivalent, Serve, adds identity headers that Funnel deliberately omits (Serve).
Stale free-tier numbers. The 3-user / 100-device Tailscale figures are everywhere and are wrong as of 2026-07-20; the live pricing page reads 6 users and unlimited user devices.
The “no client needed” claim is HTTP-only. SSH, RDP, and arbitrary TCP through Cloudflare all need client-side cloudflared, the Cloudflare One client, or Cloudflare’s browser terminal. Say that up front and half the comparison resolves itself.
Tailscale’s allow-all default. A brand-new tailnet permits every device to reach every other device. Guides that present Tailscale as deny-by-default without noting the initial policy file are describing a state you have to create.

If Tailscale’s control plane is the part you object to, the adjacent options are worth a look: ZeroTier vs Tailscale and NetBird vs Tailscale cover the mesh alternatives, and Tailscale vs WireGuard covers rolling it yourself.

Tailscale vs WireGuard (2026) — when the managed control plane is worth it and when plain WireGuard wins.
Tailscale remote access for your homelab: setup guide — our step-by-step install, ACL lockdown, subnet router, and exit node.
ZeroTier vs Tailscale (2026)
NetBird vs Tailscale (2026)
Caddy vs Nginx Proxy Manager vs Traefik (2026) — the reverse proxy that sits behind cloudflared.
Home Assistant on Proxmox (2026) — the host side of the Home Assistant remote-access question.
Vaultwarden vs Bitwarden (2026) — the one service to keep off the public tunnel entirely.

Sources

Restic vs Borg vs Kopia: Which Backup Tool (2026)

LK Wood IV — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-21 · Updated 2026-07-21 · ~11 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · Filter by destination first, then decide on the rest

restic has compression. It landed in v0.14.0 on 2022-08-25 with repository format version 2. Every guide still saying otherwise is four years stale.
Backing up to a bucket (S3, B2, Azure, GCS)? restic or Kopia. Borg documents no native object-storage backend at all.
Backing up to a Linux box over SSH? Borg, and install Borg on both ends — that is how it is designed to run.
Backing up Windows? restic (with VSS via --use-fs-snapshot) or Kopia. Borg on Windows is WSL/Cygwin only, both labelled experimental.
Borg 2.0 is still beta at 2.0.0b21 (2026-03-15). Stable is 1.4.5 (mid-July 2026). Do not build a 2026 backup plan on the beta.

Versions move fast: restic 0.19.1 shipped 2026-07-05 and Kopia 0.23.1 on 2026-06-16. Every spec here traces to vendor docs or the GitHub release API on the date above — check the changelog before you copy a flag.

The short version

Most comparisons of these three tools open with a feature grid and close with “it depends.” That grid is where the errors live. The single most-repeated claim in this search result — that restic has no compression — has been wrong since August 2022, and it is still sitting in AI summaries and in blog posts updated this year.

So here is the correction first, then a decision framework that actually resolves.

restic added compression in v0.14.0, released 2022-08-25, tied to repository format version 2. The release notes call it “the most requested feature: compression” (restic v0.14.0 release notes). Repository format 2 is now the current default for new repositories (restic docs). All three tools compress. That axis is dead.

The axis that narrows it fastest is where the backup lands. restic and Kopia can write directly into cloud object storage. Borg cannot — its documented transports are a local path or an SSH remote. That one difference eliminates a candidate for most people in about thirty seconds.

Be clear about what that buys you, though: destination is a compatibility filter, not the whole decision. It tells you which tools are even eligible. What separates the survivors is everything after — whether you need a GUI, which operating systems you have to cover, how much CLI you want to learn, and how you intend to scope compression. This guide runs the filter first because it is the cheapest way to cut the field, then does the real comparison on what remains.

Why the “restic has no compression” myth persists

There is a real fact underneath the wrong claim, and it is worth knowing because it may apply to you.

Compression only works on a repository at format version 2 or later. Old repositories are not auto-upgraded. To get compression on a repository created before 0.14.0 you run migrate upgrade_repo_v2, which verifies integrity and bumps the version, then prune to compress existing metadata. After that, new backup data is compressed, and the repository compresses progressively over time. If you would rather not wait for that drift, prune --repack-uncompressed forces existing data to be rewritten compressed in one pass. Format 2 repositories are readable only by restic 0.14.0 and newer (restic docs).

So a repository someone created in 2020 and never migrated genuinely stores uncompressed data in 2026. That is almost certainly where the folklore comes from — that, and the 2019-era third-party comparisons still in circulation, whose restic criticisms predate compression entirely. Commenters passing those around on r/selfhosted routinely flag the date themselves.

Current restic exposes --compression with five settings: off, fastest, auto (the default), better, max, also settable via RESTIC_COMPRESSION. Each step up spends more CPU to save bandwidth and space (restic tuning docs). Two of those — fastest and better — are new; restic 0.19.0 on 2026-06-09 added the extra zstd levels (changelog). The original 0.14.0 set was just auto/max/off.

If you want the working setup rather than the theory, our automated offsite backups with restic walk-through covers repository init, retention and scheduling end to end.

Decide by where the backup lands

The target is a bucket (S3, B2, Wasabi, Azure, GCS)

restic and Kopia. Not Borg.

restic documents native support for local paths, SFTP, its own REST Server, Amazon S3, MinIO, any S3-compatible endpoint, Wasabi, Alibaba Cloud OSS, OpenStack Swift, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, and rclone as a bridge to everything else (restic docs). One documented gotcha worth acting on: because of error handling in the B2 library restic uses, the project recommends reaching Backblaze B2 through its S3-compatible API rather than the native B2 backend. Same source.

Before you pick either, one requirement that belongs in this decision and almost never appears in these comparisons: a bucket your backup client can write to is a bucket your backup client can delete. If the machine being backed up is compromised, credentials sitting on it can be used to wipe the repository — which is exactly the scenario offsite backup exists to survive. Neither restic nor Kopia solves that for you; the storage layer does. Turn on object lock or versioning at the bucket (Backblaze B2 and S3 both support it), give the backup client an application key scoped to write-and-list without delete, and run pruning as a separate privileged job rather than from the client. Then actually test a restore. A bucket target without those three things is a copy, not a backup.

Kopia documents S3 and S3-compatible storage, Azure Blob, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive (native, experimental), WebDAV, SFTP, rclone, plain filesystem targets, and the Kopia Repository Server (Kopia docs). Kopia’s rclone support is marked experimental, with only Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive confirmed tested — which matches the community report of a user moving from Kopia to restic after OneDrive-over-rclone proved unreliable.

Borg documents no object-storage backend anywhere in its quickstart or FAQ. Note the phrasing: this is established by absence, not by an explicit statement from the project. But the FAQ actively points the other direction, recommending you run the Borg client where the source data is local and borg serve over SSH where the repository storage is local, and avoid NFS or other network filesystems for repository storage (Borg FAQ).

The target is an SSH box you control

Borg is at home here, and this is the case where it wins on merit rather than on habit.

Borg initializes and accesses repositories on remote hosts over SSH, and the docs are explicit that this is fastest and easiest when Borg is installed on the remote host (Borg quickstart). If you cannot install Borg at the far end, you can mount the remote filesystem with something like sshfs and treat it as local — with the documented caution that not every filesystem is stable enough for backup use.

Borg also has the widest compression menu of the three (Borg help docs):

none
lz4 — very high speed, very low ratio; this is the default
zstd[,L] — levels 1 to 22, default 3
zlib[,L] — levels 0 to 9, default 6
lzma[,L] — levels 0 to 9, default 6
auto,C[,L] — per-chunk heuristic that tries lz4 first to see whether data compresses
obfuscate,SPEC,C[,L] — pads compressed size to frustrate fingerprinting attacks based on observable chunk sizes

That last one has no advertised equivalent in restic or Kopia. If your threat model includes an adversary who can see stored chunk sizes on a repository host you do not fully trust, it is a genuine reason to pick Borg.

Borg also documents borg mount, which exposes a repository or archive as a FUSE filesystem for browsing and single-file restores. Limitation: the current FUSE implementation does not carry special filesystem flags or ACLs, and the docs recommend the nosymfollow mount option (or a container/chroot) so symlinks inside a mounted archive cannot reach outside it (Borg mount docs).

If your SSH box is a NAS or a ZFS server, the storage layer choices under it matter as much as the backup tool — see Proxmox vs TrueNAS vs Unraid as a storage backend and the NAS drives worth buying.

The fleet includes Windows

Borg is out. Its official standalone binaries cover Linux, FreeBSD and macOS on x86-64, with ARM via a third-party builder. Windows 10’s Linux Subsystem is described as experimental and not much tested, with FUSE omitted; Cygwin carries the identical experimental disclaimer (Borg installation docs).

restic backs up from Linux, BSD, macOS and Windows (restic.net), and on Windows the --use-fs-snapshot option drives Volume Shadow Copy Service, with -o vss.timeout (default 120 seconds) and -o vss.exclude-volumes to tune it (restic backup docs). Kopia supports Windows 10 or later 64-bit via CLI binary, GUI installer, Scoop and winget; macOS 10.11+ via binary, installer and Homebrew; and Linux amd64/armhf/arm64 via RPM and DEB repos, AUR and Docker images (Kopia installation).

One more restic detail that matters for mixed fleets: multiple hosts writing into one repository is officially supported and encouraged, because it increases deduplication across machines (restic backup docs).

What each tool needs installed on the far end

This is the question feature grids never answer, and it is the one that breaks deployments.

	restic 0.19.1	Borg 1.4.5	Kopia 0.23.1
Latest stable (date)	0.19.1, 2026-07-05	1.4.5, 2026-07-18/19	0.23.1, 2026-06-16
Software required on the target	None for S3/B2/Azure/GCS; SSH server for SFTP; REST Server if you use that backend	Borg itself, run via `borg serve` over SSH (or a mounted remote FS as fallback)	None for cloud backends; SSH server for SFTP; optional Kopia Repository Server
Native cloud object storage	Yes — S3, MinIO, S3-compatible, Wasabi, OSS, Swift, B2, Azure, GCS	Not documented	Yes — S3/S3-compatible, Azure, B2, GCS, Drive, WebDAV
Compression	Yes, since 0.14.0 (repo format v2)	Yes — lz4, zstd, zlib, lzma, auto, obfuscate	Yes — zstd, s2, pgzip, deflate, gzip families
Compression scope	Global flag / env var	Per-archive at create time	Per policy, with file-size and extension filters
Official GUI	No	No	Yes — KopiaUI
Native Windows	Yes, with VSS	No (WSL/Cygwin, experimental)	Yes, Windows 10+
Multi-host, one repo	Yes, officially encouraged	Yes	Yes, unlimited policies per repo
Mount as a filesystem	Yes — `restic mount`	Yes — `borg mount`	Yes — `kopia mount` (WebDAV fallback where FUSE is unavailable)
Next major version status	Shipping normally	2.0 still beta (2.0.0b21)	Shipping normally

The Borg row is the whole story. Borg is a client/server design in practice: to get its performance you want the Borg binary at both ends. restic and Kopia treat the far end as dumb storage. If your offsite target is a friend’s NAS, a rented VPS, or a Backblaze bucket where you cannot install arbitrary software, that constraint decides for you before any benchmark does.

Version status is a real differentiator right now

Borg’s current stable is 1.4.5, published 2026-07-18 at 22:36 UTC per the GitHub release API — Borg’s own changelog dates it 2026-07-19, which is the same release read in a different timezone. Borg 2.0 has been in beta for years and the newest prerelease is 2.0.0b21, published 2026-03-15 — no release candidate, no stable 2.0 (Borg releases API). The project’s own release page tells you it is beta quality, for testing, and not to point it at production backup repositories (2.0.0b21 release notes).

Community reports corroborate the cost of ignoring that. At least one r/selfhosted user upgraded to a Borg 2 beta and got stranded on a repository that was neither forward nor backward compatible; another user corrected the thread by pointing out the betas are not compatible with each other. Treat that as anecdote, not spec — the official warning says only “not for production,” not that the betas are mutually incompatible — but it lines up with the direction of that warning.

restic 0.19.1 (2026-07-05) and Kopia 0.23.1 (2026-06-16) are both on normal release cadences. The Kopia release is a bugfix for a rare race condition that could cause data loss, which is a reason to be current rather than a reason to avoid it.

What the benchmarks actually show (and what they don’t)

Thin, and contradictory. Here is everything credible we found.

deajan/backup-bench is the only reproducible-by-design suite, but it is stale — last updated 2022-10-03. Dataset: Linux kernel sources checked out at v5.19 then v5.18, 4.18 and v3.10, with the initial git directory at 4.1 GB across 5,039 directories and 76,951 files. Source host a Xeon E3-1275 with 64 GB RAM on XFS; remote target an AMD Turion II Neo N54L with 6 GB RAM on ZFS+XFS. Local initial backup: Borg 1.2.2 at 41s / 257,300, restic 0.14.0 at 23s / 260,520, Kopia 0.12.0 at 10s / 259,780 (the README’s size column carries no unit, so we do not supply one). Remote restore: Borg 244s, restic 28s, Kopia 258s (backup-bench README).

computingforgeeks is recent (updated 2026-03-31) and states its method — Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS, 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 30 GB SSD, BorgBackup 1.2.8, restic 0.16.4, Kopia 0.22.3, local filesystem repos, timed with /usr/bin/time -v. First backup: Borg 7.81s, restic 8.10s, Kopia 4.65s. Incremental: Borg 0.70s, restic 0.81s, Kopia 0.28s. Restore: Borg 0.16s, restic 3.67s, Kopia 4.39s. Peak memory on first backup: Borg 75 MB, restic 111 MB, Kopia 176 MB (computingforgeeks). The dataset is 370 MB across 1,957 files — far too small to project onto a multi-terabyte homelab, and the tool versions already trail current releases.

Those two sources point in opposite directions on restore, and they are not measuring the same thing: one has restic restoring roughly 9x faster than Borg over a remote transport, the other has Borg restoring roughly 23x faster than restic from a local repository. Different transports, datasets and versions — which is exactly why neither settles the question. Restore speed is unsettled. Anyone who ranks these three tools on speed with confidence is reading one benchmark and ignoring the other.

We also found a widely linked comparison publishing throughput figures like “180-220 MB/s” with no named author, no hardware spec, no tool versions and no reproducible commands. We are not citing it as evidence.

What competing guides skip (our angle)

One. The compression correction, with the version. restic 0.14.0, 2022-08-25, repository format v2, five modes today. Stating “all three compress” is not enough — readers need to know their old repository needs migrate upgrade_repo_v2 plus prune, and that after migration the repository only becomes readable by restic 0.14.0 or newer.

Two. The memory claims. The persistent line that restic’s RAM appetite makes it unsuitable for a small VPS traces to 2019-era write-ups that predate repository format v2 and compression entirely. restic’s official docs contain no RAM formula and no per-terabyte figure — only that limiting usable CPU cores slightly reduces memory use, that the backend can add a similar amount, and that temporary space equals the pack size multiplied by the number of backend connections plus one. Default pack size is 16 MiB, tunable with --pack-size or $RESTIC_PACK_SIZE; larger packs mean fewer files in the repository and better upload performance (restic tuning docs). Borg’s guidance is equally qualitative: have enough RAM for the repository index, chunks cache and files cache. Nobody publishes numbers. Treat the 111 MB / 75 MB / 176 MB peaks above as one 370 MB test, not as a spec.

Three. Plenty of people don’t run these bare. In the r/selfhosted threads we read, Backrest (a restic wrapper) is the single most-recommended answer, with autorestic and borgmatic close behind, and Vorta as the Borg desktop GUI. Comparing only the three binaries misses a layer that a lot of real deployments actually have. That is community sentiment from two 2024 threads with a small, self-selected sample — corroborate before betting on it — but it matches how homelabs actually look.

Four. Cloud egress. Kopia’s periodic maintenance reads from the repository. On a provider that charges for egress, that is a recurring line item nobody puts in the feature grid. Community-reported, not vendor-documented, but easy to verify against your own bill.

Five. Kopia’s honesty about its own encryption is a decent signal of doc quality: AES-256 and ChaCha20, with a footnote that the marketing term for this arrangement is imprecise (Kopia features). Kopia also scopes compression per policy — algorithm, minimum and maximum file size, and which extensions to compress — rather than one global setting (Kopia compression docs). For a laptop full of already-compressed media next to a server full of text logs, that is the more precise control.

Our call. Two of these are close enough that the tiebreaker has to be named honestly rather than asserted.

Bucket destination, command-line comfortable, mixed OS: restic — not because Kopia can’t do it, but because restic’s single-binary, one-flag operation has less surface to learn and its VSS handling on Windows is documented in more depth. If you would rather have a GUI and per-policy control than a smaller CLI, Kopia is the better fit for the same job, and calling it a tie would be fair.

Bucket destination, non-technical users or desktops to cover: Kopia — KopiaUI is the only official GUI of the three, and per-policy compression means one repository can hold a media laptop and a log server without compromise.

SSH destination you fully control: Borg 1.4.5 — not 2.0. Be precise about why: Borg has the widest choice of compression algorithms (including obfuscate, which nothing else advertises), while Kopia has the finest compression scoping (per policy, by file size and extension). Those are different axes. Pick Borg for the algorithm menu and the SSH-native design, not on a general “most control” claim. And whichever you pick, the tool that matters is the one that restores — in the threads we read, the single most-cited reason people arrive at all three is a Duplicati restore that failed when it was needed.

Backups are a layer, not a product, and the 3-2-1 backup rule is the strategy that layer serves — three copies, two devices, one off-site, and RAID is none of them. Snapshots on the source and a proper 3-2-1 target are separate jobs — see Sanoid and Syncoid for ZFS snapshots and Proxmox Backup Server in a 3-2-1 layout.

The 3-2-1 backup rule for homelabs — the strategy this tool choice serves: three copies, two devices, one off-site
Automated offsite backups with restic — our step-by-step restic setup, including repository format v2 and retention
Vaultwarden vs Bitwarden — your password vault is the first thing that belongs in these backups
Proxmox Backup Server in a 3-2-1 layout — where a file-level tool fits next to VM-level backup
Sanoid and Syncoid for ZFS snapshots — snapshot layer under any of these three
Best NAS hard drives — the drives your SSH-reachable repository should live on
Proxmox vs TrueNAS vs Unraid as a storage backend — picking the box that hosts the repository

Sources

Vaultwarden vs Bitwarden: Which Self-Hosted Server?

LK Wood IV — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-21 · Updated 2026-07-21 · ~10 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · One client, three servers

Vaultwarden and Bitwarden are not rival apps. You run the same official Bitwarden extension, desktop and mobile clients against a different backend.
There are three server shapes, not two: Bitwarden standard (eleven Docker containers, documented 2GB minimum / 4GB recommended RAM, 12GB minimum storage), Bitwarden lite (1 container, 200MB RAM, SQLite, ARM), and Vaultwarden (1 Rust container, no published hardware spec at all).
What you give up with Vaultwarden: SAML SSO, SCIM, custom roles, several enterprise policies, passkey login, and vendor support. What you gain for free: Emergency Access and Directory Connector support.
Security is a trade, not a win: smaller surface and two published 2024 audits on one side, SOC 2 Type II / SOC 3 / ISO 27001 and yearly named third-party audits on the other. Those are vendor attestations — self-hosting does not inherit them.
Running official clients against an unofficial backend is a standing commitment: Bitwarden does not guarantee the pairing, so pin your client versions, test updates before rolling them out, and keep a rollback path.

Note on sources: every figure below is pulled from vendor documentation, repository files or project wikis current as of 2026-07-20. Versions and requirements move; the Sources list at the bottom is the canonical set to re-check before you build.

The short version

The reason the vaultwarden vs bitwarden question feels unanswerable on most sites is that it is framed wrong. These are not two password managers. Vaultwarden is described by its own README as “an alternative server implementation of the Bitwarden Client API, written in Rust and compatible with official Bitwarden clients” (README). You install the exact same Bitwarden browser extension and phone app in both cases. The only thing you are choosing is which server those clients sync against, and therefore what that server costs you in RAM, features, licensing and personal responsibility.

Same clients, different server

Hold this straight and everything else falls into place. Vaultwarden even ships a patched build of Bitwarden’s own web vault rather than writing its own, and the project states plainly it is “not associated with, endorsed by, or affiliated with Bitwarden, Inc.” with “no collaboration” between the two (Vaultwarden FAQs). Bitwarden’s side of that non-relationship is documented too: it “cannot guarantee that official clients will work perfectly with non-official servers,” and says its support may be limited in helping with client issues on a non-official server (Bitwarden hosting FAQs).

That cuts both directions. The Vaultwarden wiki warns that filing a client bug on a Bitwarden repository will most likely be closed on the grounds that they do not support alternative servers (client troubleshooting), and the README carries a bolded instruction to report everything to Vaultwarden instead, whatever client you are on. Choosing Vaultwarden means accepting that you are now the integration point between two projects that do not talk to each other.

That has a practical cost worth planning for rather than discovering. Client compatibility is not a contract — it is a property that has held well in practice because Vaultwarden tracks the client API closely, but nothing obliges Bitwarden to preserve it across a client or API change. Treat client updates the way you would treat any dependency you do not control: pin the versions your household actually runs, let a new browser-extension or mobile release sit for a few days before you push it to everyone, keep a Vaultwarden release you know works, and make sure your export is current before any upgrade on either side. None of that is onerous. It is simply the maintenance you took on in exchange for the single container.

The resource gap is the real decision

Bitwarden’s own blog says it directly: the lite route deploys a single container, where the standard deployment uses eleven different Docker containers (Bitwarden blog). Reading the current setup template, the eleven that blog post refers to are mssql (emitted only when the built-in SQL Server is enabled), web, attachments, api, identity, sso, admin, icons, notifications, events and nginx, plus two feature-flagged services, key-connector and scim (DockerCompose.hbs).

Documented minimums for that standard Linux deployment are an x64 1.4GHz processor, 2GB RAM and 12GB storage, with 2GHz dual core, 4GB RAM and 25GB recommended, on Docker Engine 26+ (install on-premise Linux). It ships an MSSQL Express image with a 10GB maximum database size, and a standard deployment can be pointed at an external database instead of the bundled one — but SQLite, PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB are documented only for lite (lite docs).

Vaultwarden is one container, and since 1.17.0 a single unified image covers SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL, in Debian and slimmer Alpine variants across x86_64, armv6, armv7 and aarch64 (image guide). Here is the honest gap: Vaultwarden publishes no minimum hardware table at all. As of 2026-07-20 the wiki index carries no hardware-requirements page. The only numbers available are forum posts, and they should be labelled as such. Collaborator BlackDex suggested 2 vCPUs and 1GB of memory with storage sized to attachments, and noted that in theory Vaultwarden can run on well under 100MB by itself (forum). In a separate discussion the same collaborator put a single core at “probably fine” without heavy load, one user reported 512MB working, and another warned that 1GB “could become a problem” if you build the container yourself (discussion 2903). Treat those as community opinion, not specification.

Practically, that footprint is why Vaultwarden lands on a Pi or a small node next to everything else. If you are sizing that box, the same reasoning we used for picking a mini PC for Home Assistant applies to any small always-on server, and our Vaultwarden on Proxmox setup guide walks the LXC-and-reverse-proxy build end to end.

Head to head

Dimension	Bitwarden self-hosted (standard)	Bitwarden lite	Vaultwarden
Containers	11 base (+2 conditional: key-connector, scim)	1	1
Min RAM (documented)	2GB (rec. 4GB)	200 MB	not documented
Min storage (documented)	12GB (rec. 25GB)	1GB	not documented
Min CPU (documented)	x64 1.4GHz (rec. 2GHz dual core)	not stated	not documented
Database	MSSQL (bundled Express or external)	MSSQL / PostgreSQL / SQLite / MySQL-MariaDB	SQLite / MySQL / PostgreSQL
ARM / Raspberry Pi	no — x64 required	yes	yes (multi-arch)
Vendor stance on business use	no personal-use restriction stated	“not for use in business contexts”	individuals, families, smaller organizations
SCIM	yes (Teams/Enterprise)	n/a	not documented as supported
SSO	yes (Enterprise, `/bitwarden_license`)	n/a	OIDC only, master password still required
Emergency Access	premium / paid org only	premium	included
Vendor compliance attestations	SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, ISO 27001, HIPAA	same	none claimed
Audits	annual third-party, named firms 2018–2025	same	BSI CAOS (v1.30.3, Oct 2024), ERNW pentest (Oct 2024)
License	AGPL-3.0 + Bitwarden License for `/bitwarden_license`	same	AGPL-3.0
Latest verified version	v2026.6.2 (2026-07-08)	same repo	1.36.0 (2026-05-03)

Version data is from the GitHub release APIs for bitwarden/server and dani-garcia/vaultwarden.

What you actually give up

Vaultwarden’s supported list is longer than most comparisons admit: organization vaults, groups, collections, event logs, attachments, TOTP, Bitwarden Send, trash, master password re-prompt, personal API keys, 2FA via email, Duo, YubiKey, FIDO2 WebAuthn and authenticator apps, WebSocket live sync, admin account recovery, and a subset of enterprise policies (wiki Home).

The gaps are specific. Login with Passkeys, New Device Login Protection and the full Bitwarden Public API / Organization API key sit under “may be added over time,” with the public API only partially implemented. Custom roles and the require-SSO-authentication, vault-timeout and remove-individual-vault-export policies are “unlikely to be added without external contribution.” SSO is OpenID Connect only, with no SAML, and carries real caveats: “a master password will still be required and not controlled by the SSO,” signup is blocked when the provider reports an unverified email, and Auth0 is documented as not working because it “appear[s] not to follow the spec” (SSO wiki). Authentik is on the documented provider list, so if you already run our Authentik SSO build the OIDC path is realistic.

SCIM is the one to phrase carefully. It appears in neither the supported nor the not-implemented list, and no SCIM page appears in the wiki index as of 2026-07-20, so the correct statement is “not documented as supported,” not “explicitly unsupported.” On the official side, SCIM v2 and Directory Connector are both Teams/Enterprise features (SCIM, Directory Connector).

Two things run the other way. Emergency Access is included in Vaultwarden but is premium or paid-organization only on official Bitwarden (Emergency Access). Directory Connector is listed as supported against Vaultwarden despite being Teams/Enterprise-gated upstream. Maintainer jjlin’s summary of getting enterprise features free is “Some, but not all,” alongside a warning about third-party projects that bypass Bitwarden’s license checks: “it seems almost certain that they’re breaking the terms of Bitwarden’s licenses” (discussion 4132).

The licensing detail people miss

Self-hosting Bitwarden is free, but “some features must be unlocked in your self-hosted instance with a registered license file,” and that license file comes from the Bitwarden-hosted web app via a premium subscription or an organization owner (licensing). Only Families and Enterprise organizations can be imported to self-hosted servers, organizations must first be created in the cloud web vault for billing, and license sync requires globalSettings__enableCloudCommunication=true (self-host an organization). An installation ID and key from bitwarden.com/host are mandatory either way. At the source level, files under /bitwarden_license (Commercial.Core, SSO) are not AGPL and production use requires a paid subscription (LICENSE_FAQ). Vaultwarden is AGPL-3.0 throughout (repo metadata).

The security trade

Bitwarden’s white paper documents a dedicated security engineering team, SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 renewed annually, ISO 27001, third-party reviews at least once per year, AES-CBC 256-bit with HMAC, and a PBKDF2 SHA-256 default of 600,000 iterations with optional Argon2id (white paper). HIPAA is claimed separately, with annual third-party audits against the Security Rule (compliance) — worth noting because the white paper itself does not mention it.

One thing to be clear about, because it is the most expensive misreading in this whole comparison: those are attestations about Bitwarden the vendor and its hosted service, not about your server. Standing up the official code on your own hardware does not make your deployment SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliant, and it does not make it HIPAA compliant. Compliance follows the controls you operate and the scope an auditor agrees to — your encryption at rest, your access control, your logging, your business-associate agreements. What the official server buys you is a vendor with attestations you can reference and a support contract to point at. The audit scope is still yours to earn. The audit page names firms by year, including a 2025 cryptography report from the Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zurich, 2025 mobile work by Unit 42, and multiple Cure53 engagements back to 2018 (audits).

Vaultwarden’s counter is a smaller surface and real audit history. Two published reviews from October 2024: the German BSI’s CAOS code audit of v1.30.3, and an ERNW penetration test that “identified 3 vulnerabilities, including an authentication bypass,” responsibly disclosed (audits wiki). Release 1.36.0 shipped fixes for SSO login CSRF, user and organization enumeration, SSO existing-user binding, and SSRF via the icon endpoint (releases) — evidence of an active response process, not of an absence of bugs.

The burden shifts to you. The hardening guide states that Rocket’s built-in TLS is “intended for development use only” and not production-ready, so a reverse proxy is required for any public instance, and it recommends disabling registration, running containers as non-root, minimal volume mounts and fail2ban (hardening guide). One proxy gotcha: the WebSocket library does not honour X-Forwarded-For or Forwarded headers in any form (FAQs). Pick your proxy with that in mind — our Caddy vs Nginx Proxy Manager vs Traefik comparison covers the trade-offs. And take the README’s disclaimer literally: the project “cannot be held liable for any data loss,” and recommends regular backups. Encrypted offsite copies are the minimum bar for a password database — our restic setup walk-through is the fastest path there, and if you have not picked a tool yet, restic vs Borg vs Kopia settles it by where the backup lands.

Mobile push is the sneaky gotcha

Push notifications have worked since Vaultwarden 1.29.0, but they require an official Bitwarden installation ID and key from bitwarden.com/host, and they will not work with Bitwarden apps installed from F-Droid, Neo Store or other alternative stores, because those builds ship without Firebase Messaging support. The client also needs firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com reachable, apps connected before v1.30.2 must clear data or reinstall, and EU and US regions need different relay and identity URIs (push wiki). If your reason for self-hosting is to stay off Google services, that constraint deserves to be in the decision, not discovered afterward.

Run Vaultwarden if / run official Bitwarden if

Run Vaultwarden if you are one person, a family, or a small team; your hardware is a mini PC, a Pi or a modest VM; you want SQLite and a single container; you want Emergency Access without a subscription; and you accept full ownership of TLS, hardening, updates and backups. The project scopes itself the same way, targeting “individuals, families, and smaller organizations.” Community sizing is unremarkable at this scale — one contributor reported it running well on a Raspberry Pi and put 25 users comfortably inside its range, for a workload that mostly idles between syncs (forum).

Run official Bitwarden (standard) if you need SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, custom roles, Key Connector, vendor support, or a compliance answer for an auditor; if you can supply 4GB RAM and 25GB storage comfortably; and if you would rather pay for a license file than own the incident. The community framing matches — the recurring argument for the official server is simply preferring to let Bitwarden maintain the infrastructure (Bitwarden forums).

Consider Bitwarden lite if you want the official codebase on Vaultwarden-class hardware: 1 container, at least 200MB RAM, 1GB storage, SQLite or PostgreSQL or MySQL, ARM supported. The catch is written into the docs: lite “is intended for personal use and home-labs, not for use in business contexts.”

What competing guides skip (our angle)

Four things almost never make it into other comparisons.

First, Bitwarden lite narrows the old resource argument for personal use. Most articles still compare Vaultwarden against the eleven-container stack, which has not been the only official option for a while. For a homelab, 1 container at 200MB is a genuinely competitive official answer. It does not erase the case for Vaultwarden, though — lite is scoped out of business use by its own docs, it does not close the Emergency-Access-for-free gap, and Vaultwarden still carries the broader multi-arch story. What changes is that “eleven containers” is no longer a reason on its own.

Second, the “Vaultwarden has never been audited” claim is stale. It traces to a 2022 community post and is contradicted by the 2024 BSI and ERNW work. Repeating it in 2026 is simply wrong.

Third, Vaultwarden’s own scope statement contradicts its feature list. The wiki says development of features “mainly useful to larger organizations (e.g., single sign-on, directory syncing, etc.) is not a priority” while the same page lists OIDC SSO and Directory Connector as implemented. Read that as positioning and prioritization, not as a current feature gap.

Fourth, one Bitwarden doc inconsistency is worth flagging rather than papering over. The self-hosting page says only Families and Enterprise organizations can be imported to self-hosted servers, yet Teams is listed as eligible for both SCIM and Directory Connector. We could not resolve that from the docs, so treat Teams self-hosting as unverified and confirm with Bitwarden before planning around it. We also verified no pricing figures for this article, so none appear here.

Vaultwarden on Proxmox: full setup guide
Self-hosted SSO with Authentik
Authelia vs Authentik: which self-hosted SSO
Caddy vs Nginx Proxy Manager vs Traefik
Automated offsite backups with restic
restic vs Borg vs Kopia: which backup tool
Best mini PC for Home Assistant — the sizing logic for any small always-on box

TechFuel HQ

What DDR5 RAM Actually Costs Right Now: 16GB to 128GB Kit Price Check

16GB: the cheapest entry, and the worst per-gigabyte deal

32GB DDR5-6000 CL30: the number most people came for

64GB: double the capacity for slightly more than double the money

128GB: the tier where the math breaks

What moved over the last month

Buy now or wait: the call, and the reasoning

When NOT to upgrade

How these numbers were checked

The bottom line

Best Hardware for Frigate NVR (2026)

The three gates before you spend anything

The camera-count ladder

The Coral question, settled by the people who make Frigate

Boxes worth buying, priced 2026-07-30

Storage: where the real money leaks

Don’t forget the network side

What we’d actually buy

Sources

PSU Tier List 2026: Power Supply Tiers, Every Row Sourced

How the tiers are decided

The 2026 PSU tier list

Tier S — the units reviewers benchmark against

Tier A — excellent, held out of S by one finding

Tier B — good, with a caveat worth knowing

Tier C — budget class, fine when right-sized

Avoid — documented problems, not vibes

How to read it

The 24/7 homelab dimension nobody’s tier list covers

Your PSU is not in this table. Here is how to tier it yourself

The questions builders keep asking

Should I be worried about my PSU’s tier?

Is a lower-tier PSU dangerous with a high-end GPU?

Should I replace a working eight-year-old power supply?

What is deliberately not here

Sources

5800X3D vs 9800X3D: Should You Upgrade in 2026?

Correction first: the 5800X3D is not discontinued

The gap depends entirely on resolution

About that “42% faster” number

Where the upgrade actually pays: 1% lows and specific genres

The upscaling wrinkle that breaks the simple 4K rule

The five-minute test that beats any benchmark chart

The part nobody prices: this is a platform migration

So: upgrade, or not?

Related reading

Sources

Self-Hosted Read-It-Later Apps: Life After Pocket (2026)

What actually happened to Pocket

Read-it-later or bookmark manager? Answer this first

The tools, by the job they do

Readeck — the closest thing to “Pocket, self-hosted”

wallabag — the veteran, and the one with real export

linkding — minimal, fast, and archiving is opt-in

Shiori — one Go binary, slow and steady

Footprint and capability, side by side

What the Pocket export actually gives you

Gotchas the project docs don’t mention

Which one should you run?

Related reading

Sources

What PSU Does an RTX 5070 Need? (2026)

The card’s actual power specification

What a 5070 build actually draws

When 650W is not the answer

Transient spikes, honestly

The connector

If you already own the power supply

Lowering the number

Sources

What PSU Does an RTX 5080 Need? (2026)

The card’s actual power specification

Which 5080 did you buy?

When 850W becomes 1000W

Transient spikes, honestly

The undervolt that can buy a tier back

If you are coming from a smaller card

Sources

What PSU Does an RTX 5090 Need? (2026)