Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter, your weekly dose of hardcore PC hardware talk

Welcome to the first edition of The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardcore hardware talk from the PC enthusiasts at PCWorld. In it, we dig into the hottest topics from our YouTube show, plus all the juiciest PC news and tidbits seen across the web. 

In the best tradition of the show, grab a nice cold one (or your favorite snack food) as you down this info. It’s Friday, y’all!

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In this episode of The Full Nerd…

In this week’s episode of The Full Nerd podcast…Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, Will Smith, and Adam Patrick Murray talk for over two hours (!) about microstutter in gaming, AMD’s new Radeon GRE graphics card, and what to expect from Computex—the biggest PC event of the year.

• What if I told you that replacing your graphics card for better gaming performance wasn’t necessary? That’s the intriguing side benefit of minimizing microstutter in games, a geeky rabbit hole we dive into with Will.

  Frames per second (FPS) is actually a clumsy metric for gauging a game’s smoothness—instead, tiny hiccups in frame pacing can have a bigger effect on fluidity. We humans are incredibly sensitive to these disturbances. But as Will explains, you can measure the ideal framerate to reduce microstuttering in your games. Compensate for badly paced frame timing, and your gaming will be far more enjoyable, even at lower frame rates. The holy grail: Tuning a game to feel as superb as Doom: The Dark Ages does out the gate.

• Just one country got a new card from AMD last week—the Radeon RX 9070 GRE hit shelves in China as a current exclusive. This fresh 9000 series card fits in just below the RX 9070, and is cut down accordingly. Inside the 9070 GRE you’ll find about 25 percent fewer stream processors, and it also sports less GDDR6 memory (12GB) at slower speeds (18Gbps).

  Initial reviews say the card is about 5 to 10 percent slower than an Nvidia GeForce GTX 5070 in standard raster performance, but surprisingly, the AMD RX 9070 GRE holds its own in ray tracing. Brad’s take? At $50 cheaper than its RX 9070 sibling, this GRE variant seems reasonable, if unexciting. Whether that pricing holds if it comes to the U.S. remains to be seen, though…

• Speaking of prices, the vibe around Computex 2025 feels a bit gloomy. What is supposed to be a sleepy show may turn out to be down right lifeless. It’s a depressing thought, as Computex often showcases what to expect for product releases later in the year. And as Brad points out, U.S. residents likely won’t learn prices for anything announced, given the ongoing fluctuations with U.S. tariffs.

  Still, the news isn’t all dark clouds. We definitely know to expect Nvidia’s RTX 5060 graphics card, and the team debates what Intel could unveil. One potential juicy rumor: A joint venture between Nvidia and chip maker Mediatek. The idea of an Arm-based processor with supercharged integrated graphics is enough to brighten Will’s day, as he continues to hope for a refreshed Nvidia Shield TV console.

• Our Q&A segment gets a little extra spicy when producer Willis lobs a question to me and Will that raises both our hackles. The source of our ire? A sudden policy shift on Nintendo’s part, one that allows the console maker to brick Switches if they’re jailbroken or modified.

Want to hear us chat live about these topics and more? Subscribe to The Full Nerd YouTube channel, and be sure to activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real-time—including those that ask for our take on the best variant of yogurt.

Need even more hardware talk during the rest of the week? Our Discord community is full of cool, laid-back nerds—come join in the conversation!

This week’s hot nerd news

We love hardware. We love software. We love all the cool stuff meant for our nerdy brains. 

This week is a big ol’ mix of vibes—come for the quirky cool stuff, bear with the alarming (but interesting as heck) reports.

• CPU-level ransomware is possible: Malware can now be stashed inside a CPU’s microcode. Yeah.
• Why Doom: The Dark Ages feels so buttery-smooth: Our very own Will Smith dives into the nitty-gritty of measuring microstutter in games—and puts numbers to why the latest Doom feels so good during gameplay.
• Fractal Meshify 3 and 3 XL cases are headed our way: An update to make a fan-favorite case more modern looks good, but will it feel good to build in?
• Antec is releasing an AIO cooler with a 5-inch (!) IPS display: Take my money. Just take it now. The screen rotates a full 360 degrees. I already know which photo of my cat I’m putting on it first.
• Nvidia’s RTX 5090 can crack an 8-digit password in 3 hours: Turns out, Nvidia’s flagship GPU is able to guess a password while you’re watching a movie. Even more worrying? Cybersecurity firm Hive Mind’s experiment also looks at how fast AI tools can crack passwords. Think minutes instead of hours.
• Huge demand for Ryzen X3D chips sparked a crazy quarter for CPUs: Who needs sports when you can watch the quarterly numbers for CPU market share? (We are disappointed Warriors fans here.) Team Red’s positioning is particularly interesting, but Arm’s surge is noteworthy, too.
• The Asus tool PC gamers use to improve security has a security issue itself: Watch out for an exploitable remote execution vulnerability in Asus DriverHub—update your software now!
• Nintendo warns it can brick Switch consoles if it detects hacking: I’ll give you a hint as to what riled me and Will this week on the episode. If it’s the idea of hardware-as-service, sprung on you long after you bought the device, you’re on the right track.
• This Asus RTX 5080 Doom-inspired GPU costs as much as an RTX 5090: Itching to spend $2,000 on a graphics card and can’t find an RTX 5090? Well, there’s always this head-turner.
• Nvidia may raise GPU prices by 10 to 15 percent: Possibly temporary, definitely terrible. It all boils down to how tariffs continue to play out.
• Zotac teased AMD Strix Halo mini-PCs for Computex: I love everything about mini-PCs, especially when they pack in gaming performance. Zotac is delivering, not just with AMD graphics, but Nvidia RTX models, too.
• Samsung’s new OLED gaming monitor is 500Hz: Is it crazy expensive? Yeah. Is it also crazy slick? Heck yeah.

Also: if you heard about 89 million Steam accounts leaking, don’t stress—but upgrade your security for your account if you still have a weak password and/or haven’t yet enabled two-factor authentication.

And it’s not PC hardware, but this transparent turntable from Audio-Technica looks so neat. It’s $2,000. I own one record. I want it.

That’s it from me for this week—catch you all on the other side of Computex. A word to the wise…don’t play drinking games based on the phrase “AI” during the keynote speeches. Far too hazardous to your health.

-Alaina

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. Want The Full Nerd newsletter to come directly to your inbox every Friday morning? Sign up on our website!