TechFuel HQSet a budget below, filter by what you are actually building, and the picks sort by value with a one-line verdict and the real watt draw for each part. Here is the thinking behind the list.
Spend where the work happens. A budget is a set of trade-offs, not a single number. For a homelab the parts that determine what the box can run — drives, RAM, and the CPU’s cores and I/O — earn the money first; the chassis, fans, and networking are where last-generation or used gear saves the most with the least downside. For a gaming PC the same logic points the budget at the GPU and a CPU that won’t bottleneck it, with the rest sized to fit.
Value beats the spec sheet. The verdicts here favor the part that does the job for the fewest dollars, which is frequently a previous-generation card or a used enterprise box rather than the newest release. New-vs-used is a real fork: used wins on cores and capacity per dollar but costs you warranty, idle efficiency, and sometimes noise. Each card calls that trade where it applies.
Watts are a price tag. Every entry shows idle and load draw because an always-on homelab pays for power every hour it runs. A cheaper box that idles 40W higher can cost more over three years than a pricier efficient one, so the wattage column is there to be weighed against the purchase price, not ignored.
Prices are a snapshot. The figures are 2026 street prices and they drift; use them to compare options at a given budget, then confirm the live price at the retailer. The lasting value here is the relative call at each tier, which holds even as the exact numbers move.
Worked examples
These are this calculator’s own outputs, computed with the same formula the tool runs in your browser — so you can see a real answer without touching a single input.
Default page state — what a reader (or a crawler) sees on load, before touching any control
- Inputs: Category = All categories; What it’s for = Any use case; Budget ceiling = $2000 (the slider’s literal
value="2000"); Sort by = Price: low to high - Result: Matches chip reads 14. Cards render in this order: 1. Intel Arc A380 (6GB) $119; 2. MikroTik CRS305-1G-4S+IN $159; 3. RTX 5060 (8GB) $299; 4. RX 9060 XT (16GB) $349; 5. DIY TrueNAS Scale on used Dell R730xd $450; 6. TP-Link TL-SX1008 $489; 7. UniFi U7 Pro Max 3-pack $597; 8. Ugreen NASync DXP4800 Plus $599; 9. Synology DS925+ $649; 10. Eero Pro 7 3-pack $699; 11. ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 Gen3 $749; 12. Ubiquiti USW-Pro-Aggregation $799; 13. RTX 4080 Super (16GB) $999; 14. RTX 4090 (24GB) $1799. Updated chip reads 2026-08-29.
“Which NAS actually costs least to leave on 24/7?” — switching the sort to idle watts, which inverts the price ranking
- Inputs: Category = NAS; What it’s for = Any use case; Budget ceiling = $2000 (default); Sort by = Idle watts: low to high
- Result: Matches chip reads 4. Order: 1. Ugreen NASync DXP4800 Plus — $599, idle 16W, load 38W; 2. Synology DS925+ — $649, idle 18W, load 32W; 3. ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 Gen3 (AS6704T) — $749, idle 19W, load 41W; 4. DIY TrueNAS Scale on used Dell R730xd — $450, idle 105W, load 220W, verdict “12 LFF bays, ECC, IPMI, 2x Xeon E5. Cheapest $/TB-of-bay if you can stomach the watts and the noise. Not for living rooms.” The cheapest NAS in the dataset is the worst on idle draw by an 89W margin — that inversion is the whole point of the idle-watts sort. Read the margin as directional, not exact: no vendor publishes an idle figure for a used R730xd (its real draw depends on drive count, PSU, and CPU SKU), so that 105W is a planning estimate and its card is marked “load watts pending”.
Assumptions and sources
- Prices are a dated snapshot (the tool’s “Updated” chip shows the capture date) transcribed from manufacturer pages and retailer listings; they drift, so treat the dollar figures as a comparison baseline and confirm the live price before buying.
- Load watt figures are transcribed from the manufacturer’s own spec for that unit wherever the card is marked “load watts vendor-published”; where it is marked “load watts pending”, the vendor publishes no comparable figure and the number is a TechFuelHQ planning estimate. Idle watts are planning estimates on every entry — vendors publish a maximum, almost never an idle draw. Individual units vary, especially at idle, so measure yours if the margin matters.
- The “40W of extra idle is roughly 350 kWh a year” claim is arithmetic (40 W x 8,760 hours), and what that costs depends on your rate - the US average residential rate is published monthly in the EIA Electric Power Monthly.