I hate this, but buying a GPU now might actually make sense

Well okay, now might only be the second-best time to buy a GPU—the best time was probably just before AI-crazed companies started hoovering up all the memory and storage.

But unless you can go back in time, right now might be the best time for anyone considering a graphics card purchase to pull the trigger.

I say that because on this week’s episode of The Full Nerd I heard the hosts discussing a recent Tom’s Hardware story about a GPU vendor warning that card prices are going to rise significantly in the back half of this year. The vendor, PC Partner, also predicts that “entry-level” cards will be the hardest to get.

Of course, it’s possible that these predictions (made in a public report to investors) are a little more dire than they need to be in order to fan the flames of folks freaking out over the skyrocketing costs of PC components.

In that same Tom’s story PC industry analyst Jon Peddie suggests vendors could be taking advantage of the news about hardware shortages to boost prices more than necessary to cover costs, and PC Partners would certainly benefit from you going out and buying a a graphics card from Zotac, Inno3D or one of the other brands under the company’s aegis.

But I’ve been thinking about building a cheap Steam Machine mini PC to go under my TV in the living room for months now, and I’m seriously thinking about pulling the trigger on a GPU for that build sooner rather than later. Now the only thing holding me back is finding a great deal on the Radeon RX 9060XT card I’ve had my eye on—and after reading about the doom and gloom that’s supposedly coming to the GPU market this year, I’ve had to make peace with being a little less picky.

In this week’s episode of The Full Nerd

Speaking of Tom’s, in this episode of The Full Nerd, regular co-hosts Adam Patrick Murray and Alaina Yee are joined by Tom’s Hardware’s own Jake Roach (Senior Analyst, CPUs) to talk all the things PC.

Roach was kind enough to chat about what he learned in his recent chat with Intel exec Robert Hallock, which touched on everything from the company’s legacy chip business to its upcoming Nova Lake CPU launch.

The team also chatted about what we’ve learned from some recent reports about sales of graphics cards, including some surprising details about 16GB cards as well as the afore-mentioned PC Partner report. Stick around ’til the end for a fun run of answering questions from the chat!

Nerd news of the week

IT’s not all doom and gloom about price hikes and shortages, however; there’s all sorts of intriguing developments happening in nerd news around the web!

• Thieves swap RTX 5080 GPUs for RTX 3060s in Chinese gaming hotels: Graphics cards are so valuable these days that some enterprising thieves are nicking them out of gaming hotels in China.
• Microsoft Copilot reveals secret input that allowed it to be hacked: Security researchers found a critical vulnerability in Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise by…just asking Copilot until it revealed a trade secret that gave them access.
• Japanese repair shop sells GPU VRAM upgrades for $25 per GB — RTX 2080 Ti modded to 22GB of GDDR6: I didn’t even realize you could upgrade the RAM on a GPU, but apparently one Japanese shop is able to do so for even ancient RTX 20-series models.
• Fairphone’s latest repairable phone is finally available in the US for $650: If you love Framework Laptops and Desktops for how easy they are to repair and modify check out the latest Fairphone, an Android smartphone designed to be upgraded and repaired by the owner.

That’s your Full Nerd for this week. For more, be sure to bookmark PCWorld and subscribe to the PCWorld YouTube channel! Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website!

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.