Find out what’s inside this year’s hottest gaming laptops

In today’s episode we cover the reviews of Ryzen 5000 mobile and RTX 3080 Max-Q, the news about Iris Xe GPU, and of course we answer your questions!

Today’s Best Tech Deals

Picked by PCWorld’s Editors

Top Deals On Great Products

Picked by Techconnect’s Editors

In this episode of The Full Nerd, Gordon Ung, Brad Chacos, and Adam Patrick Murray render judgement on the powerful CPUs and GPUs you’ll find inside the next generation of gaming laptops.

We kick things off with a deep-dive into AMD’s Ryzen 5000 Mobile CPUs. Tune in (or hit that link) for an abundance of charts and discussion, but bottom line? For now, Ryzen 5000 is the ruler of all it sees. You can’t squeeze Intel’s current 14nm 8-core CPUs into laptops this thin, nor this light.

After that, Gordon wades into his GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile review, which lifted the same day since you’ll be buying laptops with AMD and Nvidia chips paired together inside. If you don’t let your expectations be warped by the stunning GeForce RTX 3080 desktop card, you’ll find its performance very impressive indeed—though some fundamental changes to the lineup means it’s now much harder to shop for gaming laptops, as Brad details.

Finally, we briefly discuss Intel’s debut Iris Xe desktop graphics cards, which aren’t intended for gaming, and disappointingly won’t work in AMD motherboards. Then we answer a few of your questions before running out the door to do boring adult things.

You can witness it all in the video embedded above. You can also watch The Full Nerd episode 165 on YouTube (subscribe to the channel while you’re there!) or listen to it on Soundcloud if you prefer the audio alone. 

Speaking of audio, you can subscribe to The Full Nerd in iTunes (please leave a review if you enjoy the show). We’re also on Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, or you can point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader to: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:226190044/sounds.rss  

If you want to wear your geekiness on your sleeve, check out our Full Nerd shirts, hoodies, and mousepads. We’ve got Full Nerd hats and beanies, too!

Have a PC- or gaming-related question? Email [email protected] and we’ll try to answer it in the next episode. You can also join the PC-related discussions and ask us questions on The Full Nerd’s Discord server. Finally, be sure to follow PCWorld on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch to watch future episodes live and pick our brains in real time! 

Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.