How we pick, and what we will not claim

Every entry on this site is built from manufacturer specification sheets and documentation, published standards from the bodies that define them, and the pattern of what long-term owners consistently report. We compare specifications across a category, identify which ones actually change the experience, and write down the reasoning.

What we do not do is testing. There is no lab here, no measurement equipment, and no bench time behind any entry. You will not find a hands-on or benchmarking claim anywhere on this site, because it would not be true. Plenty of publications make that claim without meaning it; we would rather state the basis for a recommendation and let you weigh it.

That limitation is why every page leans on what a specification means rather than on numbers we cannot produce. If a figure is not on a manufacturer sheet or in a published standard, it does not appear here.

Prices on this hardware move constantly — sales, regional differences, generational replacements. A page that quotes a price is out of date within days and misleading within weeks, and it invites you to make a decision on a number that will not be true when you click through.

It also distorts the writing. Once a price is on the page, everything becomes an argument about value at that price rather than about what the product is and who it suits. Removing prices forces the description to carry the weight, which is what it should be doing.

Check the current price at the retailer. It is correct there by definition, and it is the only place it will stay correct.

A single score compresses several unrelated judgements — build, performance, comfort, value, support — into one number and then hides every one of them. Two products scoring 8.4 can be good for completely different reasons and wrong for completely different people.

It is also a poor fit for this category specifically. A mouse that does not suit your grip is not a 6 out of 10; it is the wrong tool for your hand, and it might be a 9 for someone else. A score cannot express that, and a sentence can.

The rank numbers on each page indicate the order we would consider a category in for a general reader. They are an ordering, not a grade, and every entry states plainly who it suits and who should skip it.

Within a category we rank by how well a product serves the largest reasonable share of people looking at that category, weighted toward the specifications that are hardest to work around later. A monitor with a stand that adjusts ranks above an identical one without, because the stand is a hardware constraint. A power strip with a higher joule rating ranks above one with more outlets, because outlets are a convenience and protection is not.

Products that are excellent for a narrow use sit lower in the ordering but are described precisely, so the person with that use can find them. The twelve-button MMO mouse is not ranked below a two-button shooter mouse because it is worse — it is ranked lower because fewer people need it.

Counts differ between categories on purpose. There are twelve power strips and seven headsets because that is what the categories warranted, not because a round number looked better.

RigSpawnDesk participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, which means we may earn a commission when you buy through a link here. That funds the site. It is disclosed once on every page that carries links, and never buried.

It does not decide what appears, what order it appears in, or what is said about it. Commission rates do not vary enough between these products to make that worth doing even if we were inclined to, and the trade — short-term revenue against being wrong in public — is a bad one.

Nothing on this site is sponsored. No manufacturer has been given advance sight of a page, review rights, approval rights, or the ability to request changes. We have not accepted product, payment, or placement from any brand named on this site. If that ever changes, it will be stated on the page in question before anything else.

Specifications get revised, products get quietly replaced with different internals under the same name, and a listing that was accurate last year may not be now. Some of that we will catch on review and some we will not.

If you find something wrong — a specification that does not match the manufacturer sheet, a product that has been discontinued, a claim that does not hold up — write to us and it gets corrected. Corrections are made in place rather than quietly deleted.

Pages carry an updated year rather than a false precision of a specific date. When a page is substantively revised, the entries that changed are what changed; we do not bump a date to signal freshness without doing the work.