When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Plus the one thing we hated. Arguing over the best hardware of the year is usually fun. That's as true as ever in 2025, when Brad Chacos, Adam Patrick Murray, Will Smith, and Alaina Yee (hi, it's me) rolled up our sleeves and got down to the messy business of naming our top hardware picks. This annual tradition on The Full Nerd always involves twists and turns, especially given our individual differences on how we define "best."

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. I hope Crucial's death isn't a canary in a PC memory coal mine I'm now wondering what comes next. I did not have "Micron kills its consumer business" on my 2025 bingo card. The company announced the shuttering of its Crucial brand on Wednesday morning in unexpectedly simple, transparent language . The short version: Micron is concentrating on their business customers, where the demand has "surged" for memory and storage--thanks to data centers and their scaling up for AI.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Why Intel's Panther Lake reveal gave me existential dread I want desktop PCs and PC building to thrive. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? I never thought I'd think on laptops with envy. But here I am, writing these words.

Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter--your weekly dose of hardcore hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. In it, we dive into the hottest topics from our YouTube show, plus interesting news from across the web. Attending the Nintendo Switch 2 launch at our local Nintendo Store felled both Adam and Will, delaying our usual Tuesday episode. But don't worry: I still have plenty of juicy news bits to share with you below. Also our Micro Center tour videos are live!

AMD's Radeon 9060 XT is generally a win: The mid-range has needed a graphics card like this, especially in counter to Nvidia's RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti. But not all reviewers are happy with the pricing--the MSRP appears to be another aspirational number for now. Will AM4's stunning run come to an end because of DDR4 RAM prices? Between reduced production, trade war fallout, and economic uncertainties, DDR4 memory prices have shot up as much as 50 percent recently. That could have sad effects on our good ol' reliable pick for budget PC builds, which leaned on AM4 mobos.

PCWorld executive editor Gordon Mah Ung, a tireless journalist we once described as a founding father of hardcore tech journalism, passed away over the weekend after a hard-fought battle with pancreatic cancer. Gordon was 58, and leaves behind a loving wife, two children, older sister, and mother. With more than 25 years' experience covering computer tech broadly and computer chips specifically, Gordon's dogged reporting, one-of-a-kind personality, and commitment to journalistic standards touched many, many lives. He will be profoundly missed by co-workers, industry sources, and the PC enthusiasts who read his words and followed him as a video creator. Gordon studied journalism at San Francisco State University and then worked as a police reporter for the Contra Costa Times in the late 1990s. In 1997, he joined Computerworld (a PCWorld sister publication) before I recruited him to join boot magazine (later re-launched as Maximum PC), where he would ultimately lead hardware coverage for 16 years. At Maximum PC, Gordon developed his trademark voice that blended a hardcore passion for PC tech with non-sequiturs, deadpan humor, and occasional bursts of outrage.

"AI" is the buzzword for just about everything this year. Nvidia is probably the biggest benefactor of the AI trend, but it's not content to sit on its laurels and sell billions of dollars in silicon. The company's newest developer tool, the Avatar Cloud Engine, could help game devs make non-player characters in a fraction of the time it takes today. On PCWorld's The Full Nerd podcast, Nvidia Senior Product Manager Seth Schneider joins Adam and Will to show off this remarkable tech. The Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) goes beyond standard text and voice simulation to allow developers to customize NPCs with a range of contextual actions, giving each one a custom-tailored personality that reacts to the in-game environment.

Next year will likely be the first year of the AI PC, and chipmakers are racing to be the ones powering it. This week, AMD launched its Ryzen 8040 series of mobile CPUs alongside new Instinct hardware for the datacenter. AMD explained it all in a special episode of The Full Nerd podcast. First up: Jason Banta, AMD's client CPU chief, who spoke to Adam Patrick Murray and myself about the Ryzen 8000 series of mobile chips and how they'll enable local chatbot and AI-powered features. Pay attention to the release of the Ryzen AI Software, which "quantizes" a ChatGPT-esque large language model AI into a format that can be used on a Ryzen CPU.