Editorial Policy

How recommendations are made

Every hardware recommendation on this site comes out of a deterministic ranking, not editorial taste. For each model and use case we score candidate hardware on four signals:

• VRAM capacity against the model's memory footprint at the chosen quantization (FP16, Q8, Q5_K_M, Q4_K_M).
• Memory bandwidth, the dominant factor for tokens per second on memory-bandwidth-bound inference.
• Price at capture date from current retail listings, normalized to dollars per usable GB and dollars per estimated token per second.
• Quantization fit: whether the GPU has enough headroom for KV cache at a useful context length, not just enough to load weights.

Hardware that cannot run the model at all is filtered out before scoring. Hardware that can run it but only at degraded quantization is flagged in the recommendation, not hidden.

How data is sourced

Three sources feed every page:

• Manufacturer specs for VRAM, bandwidth, TDP, and form factor. Specs come from the vendor's own product page or datasheet, captured with a date.
• Amazon product listings for the live price and availability. This site does not copy an Amazon price onto the page. GPU pages show the manufacturer list price, with the source and the date it was checked.
• Published community benchmarks for tokens per second, where a page quotes one. Such a figure should name the run (model, quant, hardware, and who published it). This site does not measure cards or Macs.

Hardware specs are re-checked when a guide is edited. List prices are re-read from the manufacturer page on that same pass and stamped with the check date. Amazon prices are not stored.

Update cadence

A maintenance pass re-reads manufacturer list prices and open-weight model cards, then updates the guides that actually changed. Amazon availability is checked by opening the product page, not by storing a price. When a major hardware launch or model release changes a fit, the affected guide is updated in that pass.

Conflict of interest and affiliate disclosure

LLMHardware.io is a member of the Amazon Associates program. When a reader clicks a "Buy on Amazon" button on this site and completes a purchase, the site earns a commission. The commission rate is the same across every category we link to (currently flat for consumer electronics), so the site has no financial incentive to push one card over another.

No vendor pays for placement on this site. No vendor previews articles before publication. No vendor has approval rights over which hardware is recommended. The ranking algorithm runs on public data and does not know which products carry which commission rate.

Every page that contains an affiliate link shows an inline disclosure above the first "Buy" button so the relationship is visible at the point of decision, not buried in a footer.

Fact-checking process

Two layers of checking apply before a guide goes live.

Spec layer: every numeric claim about VRAM, bandwidth, TDP, or price is matched back to the source row in our hardware dataset. Numbers that do not match a captured source are removed.

Published-run layer: a tokens-per-second figure is included only when a public run names the model, the quant, and the hardware. The sentence says whose number it is. This site does not measure cards or Macs.

Where a vendor quotes a speed from a server stack, the page says so and keeps the consumer figure separate, with its source.

AI assistance disclosure

Pages on this site are written by the LLM Hardware team. The team researches published specs, vendor spec sheets and model cards, and runs the site's calculator and VRAM formula (params × bytes × 1.2 + 2). Drafting is AI-assisted: summarizing spec sheets and model cards and drafting prose. Figures are checked against the cited sources and the formula, and each page gets an edit pass before publishing. This site does not measure hardware. AI is never used to invent measurements, quoted excerpts, prices, or hardware.

Corrections

If you find an error, a stale price, a hardware spec that has since changed, or a claim that does not match your own measurements, use the contact page with the page URL and what is wrong. Confirmed corrections are logged on the corrections page with the date and a one-line description of what changed. Updated guides carry a "Last updated" date in the byline.

What this site is not

This is a hobbyist-run reference site. It is not a benchmark lab, not a vendor-funded outlet, and not a substitute for trying a model on your own workload. The goal is to save a bad purchase, not to replace your own judgment.