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."

We're in the middle of an AI revolution, and while the new technology's benefits are clear, figuring out where to get started can be confusing. You're faced with buzzwords and lingo, and a nonstop stream of AI-related news makes it difficult to resolve how AI applies to you. But here's the good news: GeForce's RTX 50 Series GPUs serve as a great hardware platform to explore generative AI right on your own PC. From running large language models to playing AI-enhanced games, RTX 50 GPUs make generative AI more accessible than ever before. Follow along as we explain Generative AI, show you how it's being used to transform science, and then help you get started with AI on your GeForce RTX 50 Series powered PC.

In this yearly penultimate episode of The Full Nerd, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, Adam Patrick Murray, and Will Smith came ready to brawl. Picking the best PC hardware of the year is no easy task, especially in a year that proved momentous for the future of computing. Heck, we couldn't even agree on a shared of definition of what "best" means – you know it when you see it -- but each participant brought his or her own picks for the best PC hardware and trends of 2023 before we all hashed out a single winner in each category. But considering how long it took to pick winners, it's probably best that we streamlined categories a bit this year. Note that this list is separate from PCWorld's wider best PC hardware and software of 2024 and best work from home tech of 2024; The Nerdies (as well call'em) are the opinion of our Full Nerd crew only.

"The year of the AI PC" got off to a strange start. All the "AI PCs" sold by manufacturers for the first half of the year are now effectively out of date. They won't be able to run Windows Recall, the Windows Copilot Runtime, or all the other AI features Microsoft showed off for its new Copilot PCs. Microsoft's Copilot PC certification just taught us a valuable lesson in buying PC hardware: Never buy hardware based on the promise of what it might be able to do in the future. Only buy PC hardware because of what it can actually do today.

Of course, we knew that AI would figure prominently at this year's CES. But as CES veterans, we've seen such sparkling promises of the next big thing eventually fizzle. Thankfully there was plenty of meat-and-potatoes PC tech on display in Las Vegas to satisfy the cravings of PC enthusiasts here and now. Whether you're a road warrior, a PC builder, a lover of games both old and new, or a content creator, we saw some truly exciting products for PC users of every stripe, and, yes, some of it even includes AI. MSI could've left well alone with the MEG 321URX QD-OLED monitor.

Ever since the debut of Cortana within Windows 10, Microsoft has tried to inject Windows with artificial intelligence. Now it's getting even more serious with a new API, called Windows ML, that will tap your CPU or GPU to make Windows and its apps even smarter. Windows ML will debut within the "next major update to Windows 10," presumably the "Redstone 4" update set to be released to hardware partners this month. Since it's an API, every developer who writes apps for Windows will be able to take advantage of the new AI capabilities. In the future, Microsoft said, Windows ML might even take advantage of an entirely new chip: a machine vision or visual processing chip designed by a subsidiary of Intel, called Movidius.