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! Want The Full Nerd newsletter to come directly to your inbox every Friday morning? Sign up on our website! In this episode of The Full Nerd… Willis Lai / Foundry 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 Yo, this 5-inch display rotates a full 360 degrees.Antec / TechPowerUp 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! Read...

BBC Sport looks at the role sports coaches are playing in steering young people away from the influences of toxic masculinity. Read...

A new deal will see premium subscribers of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age get access to world-famous sports site, The Athletic. Read...

Are you ready for this year’s summer adventures? I’m already daydreaming about mine and I can’t wait to start capturing all those special moments once June finally arrive. If you’re feeling the same, you’re going to want a proper action camera like GoPro Hero11 Black Mini, which is now 44% off at Best Buy, bringing it down to just $140. Mount it on your helmet, put it on a stick, take it for a swim—whatever fun things you want to do this summer, this compact GoPro can record it all. Not only does the camera capture gloriously stable video in 5.3K resolution at 60 FPS (or 2.7K at 240 FPS), but it can automatically upload all footage to the cloud so you don’t have to worry about it. With video stabilization, it’s perfect for action-heavy sports and activities. And while GoPros have always been pretty small, this model is even smaller. It’s a miniscule square that weighs an equally miniscule 133 grams (or 0.29 pounds) and it’s built to withstand falls, bumps, crashes, mud, snow, rain, dirt, and more. It can dive down to 33 feet in water and has a scratch-resistant lens. You’ll need a microSD card for it (sold separately), but those are fairly inexpensive these days. Don’t wait until it’s too late! Prep for the summer by grabbing this GoPro Hero11 Black Mini for $140 at Best Buy. That’s a steep drop from its original $250 price tag and a deal you won’t want to pass up. This tiny 5K GoPro is a steal now that it`s 44% offBuy now at Best Buy Read...

The BBC sports presenter says he reposted material which he’s since learned contained “offensive references.” Read...

The boy reportedly questioned ‘why am I so fat?’ and has opted out of all winter sports this year. Read...

Roku is spending $185 million to get into a business that most other streaming platforms have avoided. In early May, the company announced that it will acquire Frndly TV, the cheapest of all the live TV streaming services. For $9 per month, Frndly TV offers a bundle of channels you’d typically find in a cable TV package, including Hallmark, A&E, and The Weather Channel. While it’s normal for streaming platforms to offer their own free or premium streaming services, most aren’t selling their own bundles of cable channels with optional DVR service. Roku is doing something pretty unusual here, and while it says it’s just trying to boost subscription revenues on its platform, that doesn’t sound like the whole story to me. How Frndly fits in Frndly TV is what’s known in industry jargon as a “virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributor,” or vMVPD. You could also use the terms live TV streaming services, streaming channel bundles, or cable replacements. Whatever the nomenclature, the point is that these are essentially cable TV packages delivered over the internet. You get a big bucket of cable channels, a grid-based channel guide to flip through, and DVR functionality for recording live airings and watching them at your leisure. Most major streaming platforms have stayed out of this business, which involves cutting carriage deals with numerous TV programmers (and dealing with the risk of blackouts when renewal negotiations fail). It’s a messy business and one that’s barely profitable, if at all. So while you can access services like Hulu + Live TV and Fubo on a Fire TV Stick or Apple TV 4K, Amazon and Apple haven’t bothered putting together channel bundles of their own. (The only exception is Google, which operates YouTube TV and has its own Google TV/Android TV streaming platform.) Nonetheless, Roku sees an opportunity in Frndly TV, which claimed to be profitable in 2022. While Roku once described itself as an advertising company, lately it’s been talking up its plans to grow subscription revenue as well. The company already gets a cut when users subscribe to services on its platform, but with Frndly TV it can claim 100 percent of the revenue for itself. The near-term playbook, then, will look like it did for the Roku Channel, the ad-supported streaming service Roku launched in 2017. Roku makes more money when people watch the Roku Channel instead of other ad-supported services, so it’s aggressively promoted its own service in practically every corner of its home screen. The company has made no secret of its plans to do the same for Frndly TV. “We’re going to use [the platform] to drive Frndly, which is now part of Roku,” CEO Anthony Wood said during an earnings call. Thinking bigger If all Roku does with Frndly TV is use its home screen to peddle more Frndly TV subscriptions, that’d be pretty boring. And maybe that is the entire strategy. But my theory is that Roku will use Frndly TV as the first step toward offering a broader lineup of pay TV channels. Frndly TV, after all, is a niche within a niche, with channels that focus largely on reality TV and reruns. It carries none of the top 10 cable channels and only eight of the top 50. None of those channels cover news or sports. As of late 2022, Frndly TV had a mere 700,000 subscribers. By entering the vMVPD business, Roku instantly becomes a major player that can negotiate more and better carriage deals on behalf of its 90 million households. It would be weird if those efforts started and ended with whichever programmer has the syndication rights for Columbo and Bonanza. An equally plausible outcome is that Roku expands its channel offerings over time, taking advantage of TV programmers’ newfound willingness to allow for more flexible bundles. It could then tie those offerings into its home screen and live TV guide, with a built-in billing system to manage subscriptions. For folks who still have cable or just want an easy way to access cable channels, Roku could present itself as the simplest solution. I’ve always wondered why no streaming platform has done this—here’s me arguing for Apple to do it in 2017—and now Roku is in the best position to pull it off. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter weekly newsletter to get more streaming advice every Friday Read...

ReSport Charitable Trust is celebrating two years with a sports memorabilia auction. Read...

Can you get a hat-trick? Read...

After years of teases, hints, and vague promises, standalone streaming ESPN is finally, really coming, and we even know how much it will cost.  The new streaming service, called simply ESPN, will debut in “early” fall, at a variety of price points depending on whether you get it on a standalone basis or as part of a bundle.  To stream an “ultimate” version of ESPN that includes all its linear networks as well as broadcasts on ABC, it will cost you $29.99 a month, or $299.99 a year—yep, kinda steep, but pretty much in line with expectations ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.  You’ll also be able to get ESPN in a bundle along with Disney+ and Hulu with ads for $35.99 a month, while an ESPN bundle with ad-free Disney+ and Hulu will run you $44.99 a month.  As part of a special introductory offer, Disney will serve up the with-ads version of the Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN bundle for $29.99 for the first 12 months.  The “ultimate” tier of the new ESPN streaming service will include—at last—everything ESPN, including all its linear networks (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ESPNEWS, and ESPN Deportes) along with all ESPN broadcasts on ABC, ESPN+, ESPN3, SECN+, and ACCNX.  You’ll also get such signature ESPN shows as SportsCenter, Get Up, First Take, NFL Live, The Pat McAfee Show, Pardon the Interruption, College GameDay, and NBA Today.  That’s a big change from the ESPN+ streaming service, which only ever offered a sliver of ESPN’s linear content. Indeed, plenty of ESPN+ signups have found themselves caught off guard when they learned that SportsCenter, Monday Night Football (save for occasional one-off games), and other key ESPN shows weren’t included.  Speaking of ESPN+, that service will morph into what Disney is calling “select” ESPN. The “select” tier will cost $11.99 a month, or $119.99 a year, while bundles go for $16.99 a month (with ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu) or $26.99/month (with the ad-free versions of the latter two streamers).  Those who are still ESPN+ subscribers when the new ESPN streaming service arrives will automatically be moved over to the “select” version of the new service, meaning the old ESPN+ is effectively going away.  News of the coming ESPN streaming service comes just a day after Fox announced its own new streamer, Fox One. The upcoming Fox service will offer a variety of content, including sports, and like streaming ESPN, it’s slated to tee off in the fall.  The arrival of a standalone streaming ESPN has been years in the making, with Disney execs finally confirming the service last year.  Up until now, the only way to get the full-on ESPN experience has been through a cable or live streaming TV service, neither of which come cheap. There was ESPN+, but as I mentioned earlier, it was a poor substitute for the real deal. Read...