The Full Nerd awards: Our favorite PC hardware of 2025

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.” But you can see the effect of a multitude of wearying trends—tariffs, AI, increased memory costs—on the debates. In past years, alliances formed faster and positions softened less. More shouting happened, too. But Brad had no reason to invoke journalistic integrity this time around. We all saw the bright spots for hardware clearly; so too with the ugly news in the industry.

Instead, we argued more gently. We rallied together to remember Gordon Mah Ung, the creator and long-time host of The Full Nerd, with a new award category in his honor. And we all left feeling satisfied with the winners. Mostly.

Here are the results.

(Note: This list is separate from PCWorld’s nominees for the best PC hardware and software of 2025. The winners of “Nerdies,” as we like to call these awards, are chosen by The Full Nerd crew alone, and focus more specifically on enthusiast tech. If you’d like to catch our show in real time, be sure to subscribe to the Full Nerd channel on YouTube!)

And The Full Nerd 2025 award winners are…

As long-time viewers of the show may have expected, we once again slightly retooled the categories for this year. We expanded on “accessory,” choosing to make that slot open to components or accessories. And as mentioned, our team decided to honor Gordon with a brand-new category, meant to embody his love for (and fascination with) any technology that furthered innovation. No restrictions on how niche or widely applicable.

The categories we brawled over this year:

• Best CPU
• Best GPU
• Best PC component / accessory
• Best trend
• Worst trend
• Gordon Mah Ung Wild Card

Best CPU: AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo)

If you define “best” as hardware that pushes boundaries, then no other CPU stood out as clearly as AMD’s boundary-shattering Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (aka Strix Halo). Was it only available in select products? Sure. But it showed how CPUs with integrated graphics don’t have to play second fiddle to typical discrete GPU setups. 

Strix Halo (and future chips like it) could upend our assumptions about what a good gaming PC looks like. In this mobile processor, AMD packed in a Radeon GPU capable of similar performance to Nvidia’s RTX 4070 or 5070. A maximum of 128GB of embedded memory can fuel it as well.

And so devices we saw sporting the AI Max+ 395, like the Framework desktop and the ASUS Rog Flow Z13, weren’t just beasts at gaming. They also represent form factors that haven’t really packed such a strong punch before. For example, the Flow Z13 is a tablet notebook capable of gaming in ways that far exceeds other tablets. So while Adam believes in Strix Halo’s promise for handheld gaming PCs, the overall TFN crew anticipates a big splash across the board. Enough so that Brad thinks that Nvidia’s partnership with Intel came about in part to compete on this front.

Best GPU: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT

Despite Will’s valiant attempt to elevate the Tegra T239 (the Switch 2’s SoC) above all other GPUs, our debate rapidly focused on Nvidia and AMD’s major PC graphics card launches this year. In contrast to the muted rivalry on the CPU side, the two largest consumer GPU makers took off their gloves, with Nvidia launching its ferocious 50-series lineup and AMD its own monstrous 9000-series offerings.

Ultimately, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT took the top spot, despite back-and-forth over the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090’s sheer insanity and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti’s mix of performance, value, and availability. Team Red earned this second award for 2025 due to the 9070 XT’s combo of strong raw performance and major strides with its FSR upscaling tech. 

True, FSR Redstone can’t quite deliver the same polish as Nvidia’s more seasoned DLSS enhancements. But AMD had another thing going for it that held sway with this judging panel: better support on Linux. You may not yet be able to officially call 2025 the year of Linux, but the operating system sure commands more attention these days.

Best PC accessory: MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED 4K monitor

Sometimes when you pair a PC with the right accoutrements, you might not even notice that you lack flagship hardware in your rig. Other times, the right secondary equipment elevates the utter joy of owning blazing-fast parts.

Our winner for 2025’s best component or accessory is an example of the latter—and what a beautiful one at that. Despite its unpronounceable name, MSI’s MPG 272URX QD-OLED monitor breaks barriers. It’s among the first 4K OLED displays to sport a refresh rate at 240Hz, blending gorgeous, rich color with buttery-smooth output. You can’t get much better than this for rapid refresh rate 4K monitors—and as our reviewer says, it’s not just a superb 4K gaming monitor, but a fantastic all-around display for office tasks, HDR movies, and creative work, too.

Also getting nods as runners-up: The ASUS Rog Falcata, an excellent off-the-shelf option for a luxe ergonomic mechanical keyboard, and SilverStone’s vintage-vibes FLP-02 PC case, which brings back the best of the 90s and all its beige glory.

Best trend: Linux gets gud

A long-standing joke has been the awaited rise of Linux. (We even asked “Is this the year of Linux?” while among the nerdiest of nerds at a Micro Center opening earlier this year.) But by the end of this year, the meme felt…real.

A confluence of circumstances led to this strange new world. Windows 10’s death sparked interest in alternative operating systems, thanks to Windows 11’s bloat and outright incompatibility with older yet still usable hardware. A greater number of newbie-friendly distros exist. And, perhaps most importantly, demographics have also shifted among the user base, with friendlier voices becoming louder, setting a more pleasant tone for the Linux-curious.

We’ve seen this trend up close and personal on The Full Nerd’s own Discord server, with an influx of Linux users who discovered us through our Dual Boot Diaries show. Our newest members have added more depth and dimension to our community, offering a wealth of knowledge (and a wide variety of distro suggestions) to the uninitiated and experienced alike.

Worst trend: AI ruins everything

Last year, we voted for “enshittification” (pardon our French) as the worst trend of the year, a phenomenon driven by AI’s growing insertion into, well, everything. You couldn’t turn any direction without running into an app or service that had deteriorated in quality.

You could argue that this year, AI models and the insertion of AI-powered features have improved. That’s true to a degree, but not enough to fix the messy output, buggy software, or otherwise worsened quality of the tech we use daily. (Even more aggravating, we’re often now paying companies for subscriptions that use our data to train AI models.)

More concerning, AI has contributed to a sudden, rapid decline in affordability and accessibility of consumer PC hardware—most notably memory, which has exploded in price (and is found in just about everything we take for granted in life nowadays). We’re now unsure of the future for the PC as we know it, with all of us feeling some degree of concern about building, upgradability, and affordability in the coming months. The idea that we could return to a time when only the very well-to-do could afford modern technology is unsettling.

Gordon Mah Ung Wild Card: “What is a frame?”

For decades, enthusiasts only discussed gaming in terms of frames, and simple terms at that: Those rendered natively by a graphics card, and their quantity per second. But more recently, companies and gamers alike have begun to challenge that approach, digging with greater precision into the details. And that matches Gordon’s brand of fine-tuned nerdery.

So whether flipping on Nvidia’s multi-frame generation tech or firing up programs that record microstutter in games, rethinking what constitutes high-quality gaming performance is exactly the kind of thing that Gordon would have loved. I think he would have been championing these new approaches himself, even.

In this episode of The Full Nerd

As you already know, in this episode of The Full Nerd, we duke it out over the best hardware of 2025—but the results detailed above leave out the twists and turns (and random alliances) in our discussions. Plus hilariously choice quotes, courtesy of one Will Smith. For example:

Adam: All right, tell us why the 5090 is the best GPU of 2025.
Will: It’s real fast, Adam.

You should catch the full episode (including the preshow!) for more of these debate hijinks. We may not have forced chat to break any ties (especially in ways that Brad still has not forgiven me for), but we still had lots of fun despite the bummer year.

Also, stay tuned for not just one but TWO streams next week! (Details in my sign-off below.)

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 NEW shows too—you can catch episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and The Full Nerd: Extra Edition now!

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

This week’s ominous nerd news

According to analysts, we’ll soon see laptops reflect the ongoing woes with memory availability and affordability. I am not looking forward to a regression in configuration options. Nor am I happy to hear that RAM pricing hurts so bad that DDR4 compatible processors (like the AMD 5800X3D) now cost a ton, too.

Never thought I’d cross my fingers for AMD to start producing more Zen 3 chips soon, but here we are.

• Mid-range laptops may return to 8GB RAM as default: I hate it. I also hate that Windows 11’s bloat is the reason budget laptops aren’t yet set to slide back down to 4GB.

• Also, Kingston says to buy your RAM now: In an interview with our very own Mark Hachman, a company representative warns that prices will only go up. We all knew this to be true, but still. Ouch.

• &*#% yeah: I’m glad we have science proving the benefits of swearing. I plan to make use of this knowledge when struggling through my push-ups next Tuesday.

• A $100 Steam Machine with Bazzite? This project sounds absolutely up Will’s alley. I hereby nominate him for giving it a go and reporting back to us on how it went.

• You can get a Raspberry Pi to train you in chess: Here’s a neat project, courtesy of my German colleagues at PCWelt. But as miraculous as Raspberry Pis can be, I don’t think they can do the impossible. (That is: Train me in chess.)

• Feels like the pandemic again: Never thought I would have sold an old webcam for far more than I paid, but such was 2020. Now apparently 5800X3D owners have the same option.

• I don’t even have a wall big enough for a 100-inch TV: But you know what, I’d still be interested in seeing one of these OLED competitors up close. Who needs windows or sunlight, right?

• That’s nuts: Micron said in a recent earnings call that it can only meet about 50 to 66 percent of demand. Makes more sense now why Crucial got axed so abruptly, I guess.

• Who needs a graphics card, anyway? Each year, Mike Crider updates his handy guide to games that don’t need a graphics card. It’s a perfect thing to keep in your back pocket when helping dole out tech advice during the holidays (as we all inevitably do).

• What even happened over there: If you can’t handle depressing PC carnage, avoid this story about a man who apparently lost 50 SSDs to a destructive young child. The pictures are brutal.

Coming next week…

By the way, we have a surprise for you all next Monday—we’re having a tribute stream to Gordon starting at around 11am Pacific! Come hang out for a variety show, set to span several hours. What exactly we’ll be doing? A little building, a little chatting, and more! 🍕

And of course, on Tuesday, it’s time for us to score how well we did at foreseeing the future. Will has a lot of 2025 predictions on the board. Like double the rest of us. I for one am interested to see how accurate he was.

Catch you all soon!

~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.