The Swiss star reflects on their victory in 2024, and expresses concerns for this year`s contestants. Read...

Acer’s new Aspire notebooks for Computex 2025 offer the choice of all three processor platforms, with either 14- or 16-inch display options. But there’s one big problem that the company can’t do anything about. In a word? Tariffs. Acer’s Aspire notebooks typically are its most affordable, so America’s fluctuating import tariffs add a confusing wrinkle to anything Acer announces. As a result, Acer isn’t announcing either the pricing or the ship date for its six new Copilot+ PCs. It is, however, disclosing what European customers will pay. Acer’s new Aspires are easy to understand: the company is shipping two notebooks, each with Intel’s Core Ultra (Lunar Lake) series, the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series, and the low-end Qualcomm Snapdragon X platform inside. In each processor category, Acer is shipping both a 14-inch and a 16-inch version. All qualify as Copilot+ PCs. Perhaps because of the price, Acer executives told us that the emphasis is on the Snapdragon-based Aspires. The 14-inch version will ship for 899 euros ($1,006) and will be available in June to European customers. Naturally, we just don’t know what tariffs will do to your wallet. Acer While there are slight differences, each of the 14-inch Aspires generally shares the same features as the others, and the same goes for the 16-inch Aspires, too. There are some slight variations, we’re told: for example, the Snapdragon PC platform includes a 1440p webcam, while the AMD and Intel versions include a more basic 1080p webcam. The Intel- and Qualcomm-based Aspires include Wi-Fi 7, while the AMD-based Aspire ships with a Wi-Fi 6e radio instead. The Intel variant also includes Thunderbolt 4 ports, while the others include the virtually identical USB4. Finally, the Intel-based Aspire ships with a 1920 x 1280 display option (and a 60Hz panel), while the others ship with a 1920 x 1200 display instead but nudge up to 120Hz. Qualcomm These are the specifications for the new 14-inch and 16-inch Aspire AI notebooks, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip inside. I had a chance to briefly check out the new Aspires in a press preview before Computex. The displays of the new Aspires are better than you might expect, with both OLED options and conventional IPS panels that can reach 500 nits and top out at 120Hz refresh rates — not what you would normally expect for a budget PC. Memory options climb to 32GB of LPDDR5X, with storage options of up to a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSDs. In general, the 14-inch Aspires measure 12.28 x 8.89 x 0.63in. and weigh about 2.73 pounds, while the 16-inch versions measure 13.97 x 9.85 x 0.63in. and weigh about 3.28 pounds. There are some slight variations depending upon the processor. Acer Acer’s 14- and 16-inch Aspire AI notebooks, this time with an Intel Lunar Lake chip inside them. Again, the key is the price. Acer’s two Snapdragon Aspires, the A14-11M and A16-11M, will ship for 899 euros ($1,006) and 999 euros ($1,118) in June and July, respectively. The Acer Aspire A14-53M, a 14-inch Aspire with Intel’s Core Ultra chip, will ship for 999 euros ($1,118) in July and accompany the 16-inch A16-52M for 1,099 euros ($1,230), which will ship in August to the European market. Finally, Acer will ship its 14-inch A14-61M and the 16-inch A16-61M with Ryzen AI 300 processors inside to Europe in July and August for 999 euros ($1,118) and 1,099 euros ($1,230). As for the United States? Acer said that it will announce a ship date and price for the various models closer to when you can buy them. Read...

Acer is launching two creator-class laptops at Computex 2025: the Swift X 14 and Swift X 14 AI, which give buyers the choice of either an AMD or Intel processor as well as an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070. A creator-class laptop splits the difference between a traditional productivity laptop and a gaming device, with a midrange GPU that can handle both tasks, and with decent battery life, too. In the case of the Acer Swift X line, the two laptops have identical measurements (12.69 x 8.95 x 0.38-0.71 inches) and weigh about 3.5 pounds. What the Swift X offers is demure performance: It lacks the RGB keyboards of Acer’s Predator lineup, and includes a haptic touchpad as an additional feature. A haptic touchpad is equally clickable all along its surface, with minimal effort. Acer even includes a stylus for taking notes on the touchpad or the laptop’s 14.5-inch 2800×1800 OLED display, which delivers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. That display appears to be just 60Hz, however. The only difference between the two Swift X’s is in the processor: The Swift X 14 AI features the choice of a Copilot+ capable Ryzen AI 300-series chip, from the AI 5 340 on up to the AI 9 365. Alternatively, the Swift X 14 includes either Intel’s Core Ultra 225H, 255H, and 285H. All are members of Intel’s Arrow Lake family, which can only provide 13 TOPS and do not meet Copilot+ requirements. Mark Hachman / Foundry Inside, Acer offers up to 32GB of LPDDR5X system memory as well as up to a terabyte of storage — but with two M.2 slots for SSDs, so users can add more. Acer provides a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a pair of USB-A ports, with one available for charging. The laptop also includes an SD slot, as well as an undisclosed HDMI port. Acer includes a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports in additional to USB-A and HDMI.Mark Hachman / Foundry Though there’s just a 1080p webcam, it can identify you for Windows Hello biometric recognition. There’s a fingerprint reader underneath the power button, too. The wrinkle is the pricing and availability. Because of the constantly changing tariffs, Acer isn’t disclosing pricing or availability quite yet. The company will ship the Swift X in 30 to 90 days, but isn’t saying exactly when. “We will announce U.S. pricing, availability, and configurations closer to market availability in the United States/North America,” Acer said in a statement. Both Swift X laptops will be available in Europe in July, for 1,799 euro, or about $2,012. Acer Read...

Acer’s Swift Edge 14 AI laptops already feel like one of the standouts of next week’s Computex 2025 show, combining a matte OLED display with an incredibly light weight. If you’re constantly on the go, this might be a laptop for you. All told, the Acer Swift Edge’s magnesium-aluminum chassis eliminates the vast majority of the weight. At 2.18 pounds, this puts the emphasis on light, which should be one of the focus points for a laptop that is constantly dropped into a bag or backpack. Acer’s Swift Edge 14 AI (SFE14-51 and -51T) and the Swift Go 14 and 16 AI are among the number of laptops that the company is debuting at Computex in the thin-and-light category, along with the Swift X creator series and the cheaper Aspire notebooks as well. Acer is also launching updates to its Predator line of gaming notebooks, too. I had a chance to go hands-on with the new Swift Edge in a preview of Acer’s Computex lineup. The Swift Edge is incredibly light, easily drawn out and moved around with a single hand. The real star of this Core Ultra (Lunar Lake) notebook may be its 14-inch screen, a 2880 x 1800 OLED coated with a Corning Gorilla Matte Pro finish. Laptop makers typically offer reflective screen which can mirror the light and background of your nearby environment. If you’ve ever worked in a library or cafe with overhead lighting, you’ll notice it. On the other hand, a matte screen dulls all that, eliminating reflections and minimizing the reflected light. That’s even more important with an OLED display, whose rich blacks tend to emphasize a reflective display. Acer’s Swift Go laptops, available in 14-inch and 16-inch screen sizes, are a bit more conventional. Like the Swift Edge AI, these are Copilot+ laptops, so the Intel Core 200V chips (Lunar Lake) inside these Swift Go 14 AI and Swift Go 16 AI allow for Microsoft’s Copilot+ experiences like Windows Studio Effects, Windows Recall, and more. The signature feature here is one you may have seen before: the Acer Multi-Control touchpad that provides contextual controls — such as play, pause, and fast-forward/rewind — during specific applications. The Swift Gos also include Acer Assist, a dedicated AI app, which provides a folder into which users can load documents and then assign an LLM to make sense of them all. The new Swift Go platform also includes Purified Voice 2.0, which can filter out ambient noise during video calls like magic. (Rival Asus offers a similar technology. Both use the NPU for noise filtering, which I’ve tested.) Because of the variability of the Trump tariffs, Acer isn’t disclosing pricing or the ship date of these laptops for the U.S. markets. In general, however, you should expect them to ship in between 30 and 90 days, Acer tells us. “We will announce U.S. pricing, availability, and configurations closer to market availability in the United States/North America,” Acer said in a statement. Acer did provide European pricing, however, as a point of comparison. Acer Swift Edge 14 AI Previously, Acer’s Swift Edge featured AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 CPUs. At least for Computex, Acer is showcasing the Swift Edge AI with just Intel inside. Acer’s Swift Edge 14 AI helps set the bar for the thin- and-light laptop category.Mark Hachman / Foundry Acer’s Swift Edge 14 AI measures 12.35 x 9.02 x 0.37in (9.3-16mm) and includes processor options from Intel Core Ultra 5 226V to the Core Ultra 9 288V, plus Intel’s integrated Arc graphics GPUs. Though it’s thin and light, it’s not flimsy; the laptop is rated at MIL-STD 810H resilience. Inside the notebook are options for either 32GB of LPDDR5X memory and up to a terabyte of PCIe Gen 4 SSD storage. This is the advantage of a matte screen: look at your phone or laptop edge-on, and note the reflections…which don’t appear here.Mark Hachman / Foundry Although battery life will vary based on a number of factors, the Swift Edge boasts a 65Wh battery, enough for what the company says is good for 21 hours of battery life. Wireless connectivity is supplied by Intel’s Killer Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 and above. There are also plenty of ports: a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, plus two USB-A ports, one that’s capable of charging. The specifications of Acer’s Swift Edge 14 AI.Acer Acer includes a standard 1080p webcam on the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI, but with an additional fingerprint reader mounted behind the power button. The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI (SFE14-51/T) will be available in Europe in June, starting at EUR1,599 ($1,788) and in Australia in the second quarter, starting at AUD3,999. Acer Swift Go 16 AI and Acer Swift Go 14 AI Acer’s Swift Go laptops are thicker, and built out of aluminum. Acer’s 14-inch Swift Go 14 AI, for example, measures 12.3 x 8.89 x 0.63 inches and measures 3.06 pounds; the 16-inch version measures 14 x 9.87 x 0.63 inches and weighs a chunkier 3.53 pounds. They both include 64Wh batteries. Acer’s Swift Go 16 AI.Acer The two laptops are built around either your choice of an OLED (a 16-inch 2040 x 1280 or 14-inch 1920 x 1200) or a standard 1200p IPS display — put another way, the 16-inch offers significant differences in screen resolution while the 14-inch does not. In both, you’ll have a choice between four different Core Ultra (Lunar Lake) processors, with up to 32GB of LPDDR5X memory and a whopping 2TB of storage. Both laptops have two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports, WiFi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4. The Acer Swift Go 16 AI (SFG16-74) will be available in Europe beginning in August, starting at 1,299 euros ($1,453). The Acer Swift Go 14 AI (SFG14-75) will be available in Europe in July, starting at EUR1,199 ($1,341). Acer Read...

Acer’s most interesting gaming notebook for Computex 2025 isn’t necessarily a gaming notebook at all. The Predator Triton 14 AI is a surprisingly thin, creator-class notebook that includes both Intel’s Lunar Lake notebook CPU alongside an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU cooled by something new: graphene. Acer also is announcing the Acer Predator Helios Neo 14 AI, a slightly cheaper version, plus refreshes of the Nitro lineup that go as large as an 18-inch display. Here’s what you need to know about all three gaming laptops: Acer’s 14.5-inch Predator Triton 14 AI is just 11mm thick at its thinnest point. Acer replaced the traditional liquid metal with graphene for improved cooling, and there’s a haptic touchpad (with its own stylus!) for inking while you’re on the go. Acer’s new 14.5-inch Helios Neo 14 AI combines a Core Ultra 9 285H with an RTX 5070, and should cost a bit less. Acer also is shipping several versions of its Nitro gaming laptops, both 16- and 18-inch versions which focus on the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processors. One of the questions I asked was if Acer is designing toward a price point, or to the component choices it deemed best for its users. Acer executives said they were making the latter choice, which might be one of the reasons that Acer is keeping the price and availability of the laptops mum for now. “We will announce U.S. pricing, availability, and configurations closer to market availability in the United States/North America,” Acer said in a statement. Acer did provide pricing and availability for Europe, which we’ve included here for comparison’s sake. Acer Predator Triton 14 AI Acer’s new Predator Triton 14 AI reminds me of a classical gangster: dark suit, dark tie, sunglasses, coolly confident. That’s until the per-key RGB lights up, reminding you what you’re here for. Creator-class notebooks have always interested me, since they offer some of the power of a gaming laptop without all of the weight. A few years ago, you might have to think about whether a lower-end discrete GPU could offer enough gaming horsepower; today, frame generation technologies are working to make that a moot point. As I held the Triton 14 AI (PT14-52T) at Acer’s preview, I was impressed by how compact it felt: it measures 12.6 x 8.7 x 0.43 inches at its thinnest, sloping out to 0.68 in (17.31mm) at its thickest — it still weighs 3.7 pounds, but that’s a far cry from the laptops that weigh over 5 pounds or more. (It earned Nvidia’s Studio Premium certification, which requires a thickness under 20 mm.) Acer treated the dark chassis with an anti-fingerprint coating that seemed to really work, and it’s the only one of its new gaming notebooks that included it. Acer’s Predator Triton 14 AI features per-key lighting and an Intel Core Ultra 200-series chip inside. Willis Lai / Foundry Acer built in a graphene thermal interface material into the insides of the laptop, which the company estimates will actually offer 14.5 percent better cooling, combined with the 0.5-mm-thin AeroBlade 3D metal fans that directs cooling air to the laptop’s hot spots. With the additional cooling, Acer has a choice to either push clock speeds faster or go thinner and lighter, and executives said the target market caused them to opt for the latter. While Acer didn’t reveal the key travel, the RGB keyboard does offer per-key lighting, controlled by the PredatorSense app. The touchpad joins the small but growing trend of laptops that use haptics for a uniform click experience across the whole of the trackpad. I didn’t expect Acer to include a bundled stylus, but it has done so, with support for the AES 2.0, USI 2.0, and MPP 2.5 protocols with 4,096 pressure level and tilt support. And look at the photo above. The trackpad almost disappears! Otherwise, the 14.5-inch 2,880 x 1,800 OLED display features 100% DCI-P3 color at up 120Hz — with touch support, which in OLEDs isn’t always a given. There’s just 340 nits of light output, however. Inside is an Intel Core 288V “Lunar Lake” chip, up to 32GB of DDR5-8533 memory and a PCI Express Gen 4 connection allowing customers to configure up to 2TB of SSD storage. Intel’s Killer Wi-Fi 7 and Thunderbolt 5 also appear. These are the specifications of the Acer Predator Triton 14A AI, as provided by Acer. Acer also made some last-minute changes that are reflected in the text.Acer Remember, Intel’s Lunar Lake processor and its 48-TOPS NPU makes this a Copilot+ PC, with support for all of Microsoft’s AI-powered features like Windows Recall. The Predator Triton 14 AI (PT14-52T) will be available in EMEA in July, starting at 2,999 euro Acer said. Predator Helios Neo 14 AI Acer’s Predator Helios Neo 14 AI laptop (PHN14-71), also with a 14.5-inch display, uses the Core Ultra 200H “Arrow Lake” chips, which performed surprisingly well in our laptop tests without all of the issues of their desktop cousins. They don’t offer the AI performance of the Lunar Lake family, however. Acer’s Predator Helios Neo 14 AI.Acer Acer typically uses the “Neo” branding to denote a step down, and some of the innovations on the Predator Triton 14 AI do not appear here. For example, Acer returned to the 5th-gen AeroBlade technology and the more traditional liquid metal thermal grease and a vector heat pipe. Likewise, the laptop uses a slightly older WiFi 6e technology alongside Thunderbolt 4, and the RGB keyboard is divided up into three zones. Physically, the Helios Neo 4 AI weighs 4.2 pounds, and measures 12.7 x 10.2 x 0.81 in., with the thinnest point being 11.5mm. Acer Users will have an option between a 14.5-inch OLED (2880 x 1800, 120Hz, 400 nits, 10 percent DCI-P3) or a 14.5-inch IPS (2560 x 1600, 165Hz, 400 nits, 100% sRGB) and choices of either a Core Ultra 9 285H/255H and an RTX 5060 or 5070 GPU. Users can choose from up to 32GB of DDR5-7467 memory and up to 2TB of PCI3 Gen 4 storage. The Predator Helios Neo 14 AI (PHN14-71) will be available in EMEA in July, starting at 1,699 euro. Nitro 18, 16, and 16S Finally, Acer has the Nitro lineup of gaming notebooks, which typically include almost dozens of different variants. For Computex, Acer is launching the Nitro 18 AI and the Nitro 16 AI, as well as the Nitro 16S and Nitro V 165 AI. They’re all oriented around the Ryzen AI 9 365 (Strix Point) architecture from AMD, which includes Copilot+ AI capabilities. Typically, Acer charges about $1,200 to $1,500 for these laptops. Here’s what we know about the Nitro 18: it will have an 18-inch display with 2560 x 1600 resolution at 165Hz, with 32GB of DDR5 5600 memory and 2 TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage. Acer will use copper and vector heat pipes inside to cool an Nvidia GeForce 5070 Ti. As for the Nitro 16S AI, Acer is offering users a Ryzen AI 9 365, up to an RTX 5070 Ti, 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory and 2 TB of SSD storage, all hidden below a 2560 x 1600, 180Hz display. The Nitro V 16S AI will offer the same display, memory, and storage options, but an RTX 5070 instead, plus USB4. Read...

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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...

RNZ had 13 finalists in the prestigious industry awards. Read...