PC building’s weird new reality: Your favorite old parts are back on the menu

Your weekly edition of The Full Nerd has arrived, and there’s a new face on the team: mine!

Hey there. My name is Alex, and I’ll be your friendly Full Nerd newsletter delivery boy for the foreseeable future. Alaina and Adam were kind enough to welcome me to the show this week with some killer Korean snacks (who knew cilantro Doritos could taste so good?) and a fun chat about the future of the PC and game consoles at large.

But really, what we spent the bulk of the show discussing is how skyrocketing prices on RAM and storage will affect your ability to build, buy or upgrade PCs over the next few years. While this month’s Computex show in Taiwan wasn’t exactly packed with new cutting-edge hardware, there was a surprising amount of chatter about hardware vendors revivifying their older components and putting them back on the market in order to support customers still running machines packing older DDR4 RAM.

At Computex, for example, AMD brought the legendary Ryzen 7 5800X3D back nearly half a decade after its debut. While it stings to see the company charge over $300 for a CPU that old, the silver lining is that the 5800X3D spent years as one of the best CPUs on the market when it came to gaming. And while that’s not really true these days, the fact remains that it’s probably still a decent processor for mid-range PCs. More importantly, it supports older, cheaper DDR4 memory and thus could fill a need for folks upgrading older PCs or building new ones to weather the current affordability crisis.

It can be tempting to give into despair when you see your favorite component makers rereleasing old hardware, even more so when you read the recent reports about Intel’s plans to release a new iteration of its (in)famous Raptor Lake CPUs in 2027. While that has yet to be confirmed by the company, it’s not hard to believe. The price of modern storage and RAM has skyrocketed in the last year or two, and since Raptor Lake can support either newer (and pricy) DDR5 RAM or the older (but cheaper) DDR4 variety it’s easy to imagine Intel shipping new Raptor Lake CPUs next year for folks looking to build or upgrade their DDR4 systems.

It’s not just happening the CPU business, either. We’ve seen reports of GPU manufacturers re-releasing models of GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs that are six years old, for example, and that breaks my heart because I remember when those cards launched in 2020 they seemed a bit too expensive for what you got. Now not only have prices on GPUs continued to climb, but PC enthusiasts are having to seriously consider building new PCs using 5-year-old components that cost more now than when they were new.

And hey, that’s a depressing thought! But I want to caution you against freaking out too much about the future of the PC. Not because you’re wrong to do so, but because I hate to think of all you beautiful nerds out there tearing your hair out in dismay over something we can’t do much about.

See I’ve been building, buying and breaking PCs since I was a kid, and at times like this I like to remember how much fun I had trying to cobble together computers in the ’90s and get them to boot. I didn’t have much spending money back then, and the process of building and tinkering with PCs to try and get everything working well enough to play Doom or SimCity 2000 wasn’t what I’d call fun or easy. But despite all the headaches I had trying to configure my high and low memory settings just right or getting the sound card to function, I can remember spending hours entranced in learning how PCs work and how to make them work for me.

The joy and satisfaction I found in futzing with PCs laid the foundation for a lifetime in this community, and in times like this I like to reflect back on what I really love about computers: they’re fascinating, complex devices that are capable of doing amazing things, and we can build them. We can break them, upgrade them, and repurpose them however we see fit to enrich our lives. And we enrich ourselves and our understanding of the world in the process.

All of that is still on the table, and it’s still accessible to you if you’re interested. So while we did end up spending the bulk of this week’s show discussing the return of old components and the uncertain future of high-end hardware (sorry Xbox), at the end of the day I think what’s exciting and invigorating about this community is the passion and ingenuity of its members. So as we pour a few out for the good ol’ days of cheap RAM and plentiful hardware, I want to encourage you to look on the bright side: PCs aren’t going anywhere, and you can still have a blast with them even if you can’t (currently) afford a new one.

So whether it’s making an old PC feel new again with some canny tweaks under the hood or turning an old laptop into a Linux machine you can mess around with, I encourage you to seek out fun projects rather than letting your (very reasonable and understandable!) frustration with the state of PC hardware make your mood any worse. Lots of folks are going through a hard time right now, and as the tech industry deals with its own hardships I like to appreciate the hardware I have and what I can do with it rather than freak out over what I’m missing out on.

In this episode of The Full Nerd

And hey, if you don’t see eye-to-eye with me on this, good news! Adam Patrick Murray and Alaina Yee offered some contrasting opinions and useful insights in this episode of The Full Nerd, in which we chat about the state of the PC industry and the future of Microsoft’s Xbox business. Make sure you don’t skip the pre-show, either, because Adam brought back some killer snacks from Computex in Taiwan and we had a blast trying them live.

Missed our live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd Network YouTube channel, and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real time!

Don’t miss out on our other shows too—you can catch episodes of Dual Boot Diaries, The Full Nerd: Extra Edition, and Expedition: Handheld through our channel!

And if you need more hardware talk throughout the rest of your week, come join our Discord community—it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds like you!

Nerd news of the week

There’s lots of other interesting stuff happening in the world if you know where to look!

• Brain implants are helping us speak: A paralyzed man is able to speak to his family again thanks to an experimental implant in his brain. Advanced ALS makes his voice hard to understand, but the BrainGate2 system (currently in clinical trial) uses an implant in the speech center of his brain to generate text based on his thoughts that he can then “speak” using a digitally-generated version of his pre-ALS voice.

• We’re building Battlebots for real: No matter how Terminator movies they make, some people will still try to put a gun in a robot’s hands. That’s exactly what Foundation Robotics is trying to do for its Phantom humanoid robots, which are being trained for both civilian and combat use with specific emphasis on “warfighting” in place of human soldiers. What could go wrong?!

• Put a Commodore in your pocket: Two new PCs have been released under the venerable Commodore brand since it was purchased in 2025 by a prominent tech YouTuber, but the company’s latest product isn’t a PC—it’s a flip phone. Branded the Commodore 8020, this Android phone starts at $500 and uses its own app store (the “Commostore”) which features “99%” of Android apps but blocks social media and browser apps, making it an exciting option for anyone tired of mindlessly scrolling Instagram and TikTok.

• Wallpaper Engine users, beware: The security experts at Kaspersky recently announced they’d discovered instances of bad guys using the popular Wallpaper Engine app from Steam to install malware on users’ PCs and steal key data. Kaspersky claims it mostly saw users in China and Russia being targeted, but it also uncovered examples everywhere from Canada to Germany and Singapore. While Kaspersky claims Steam acted on its findings and removed malware-carrying wallpapers from the platform, the researchers expect more to spring up.

• Forget atomic, nuclear clocks have arrived: Two different teams of scientists claim to have successfully built nuclear clocks, a first for the world. I barely understand how these time-keepers shoot UV light at thorium-229 nuclei embedded in calcium fluoride crystals to trigger a state change (the “tick” of the clock) and keep time, but I gather they’re exciting because these kinds of clocks are even more insulated against cosmic radiation and other outside influences than atomic clocks—so they should help us expand our understanding of the universe and dark matter.

• 360 degrees of the Time Warp: Head’s up, Rocky Horror Picture Show fans: Tim Curry’s 1975 tour de force is going to debut inside the 466-foot tall Las Vegas Sphere next year, pushing the bounds of technology and good taste. I grew up going to RHPS screenings so I’m a huge fan of the film, but if this 360-degree screening of one of my favorite cult classics ends up using CGI and weird AI-generated assets to fill out the space (as they reportedly did for the version of The Wizard of Oz screened at the Sphere last year) I think I’ll pass.

• Get ready for a better look at space: NASA plans to launch a new telescope into space this August that should be able to survey the stars faster than anything we’ve got currently, potentially helping us study and catalog thousands of galaxies and interstellar phenomena faster than ever before. It’s named the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to honor the pioneering astronomer who became NASA’s first chief of astronomy, and NBC has a pretty fascinating deep dive into how it will work to help us understand dark energy and dark matter in the universe.

Now it’s time for me to let you get back to your day, but before I do I wanted to say thank you for making my first few weeks back at PCWorld some of the most pleasant in recent memory. And hey, if you miss reading Alaina’s excellent newsletters, make sure to go sign up for her new one Safe Mode! Every week she’s serving up useful, friendly advice to help you safeguard your devices, spot scams before they get you, and just generally live a happier, safer life online. Don’t miss it!

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.