Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardcore hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. In it, we dive into the hottest topics from our YouTube show, plus hot news from across the web. This week, the theme is gaming: a possible new X3D CPU from AMD, Steam showing detailed performance stats, and the future of Xbox. We also squeeze in two pieces of breaking news to kick off the show! Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website! In this episode of The Full Nerd… Alex Esteves / Foundry In this episode of The Full Nerd, Adam Patrick Murray, Alaina Yee, and Will Smith first go off-script to quickly cover Nvidia’s new sub-$300 GeForce RTX 5050 and Microsoft’s surprising extension for Windows 10 security updates. (There is, of course, a catch.)  Then it’s on to the topics of the week: AMD’s likely release of a 9600X3D, our take on the Steam Beta’s new performance monitoring stats in the overlay, and what the next Xbox could look like. We meant to start with leaks, but instead we had solid news to kick off the episode. First up: Nvidia’s new RTX 5050 is sliding into the light with very little fanfare—this fresh addition to the RTX 5000 series will come in at $250, a price point sorely underserved currently. Also potentially underserved: Budget gamers, who won’t get the perf they deserve with the RTX 5050’s 128-bit bus.(When asked offline, Brad said, “I’d look at the used market instead to get something much better, or pray you can find a B580 around the same price.”) Also: Surprise! After our long discussion last week about Windows 10 and the security implications of its coming end-of-life in October, Microsoft unexpectedly announced a one-year reprieve for everyone. Well, sort of. You can get an extra year of Windows 10 security updates if you activate Windows Backup and sync to OneDrive. Or, the better deal hack: Use Microsoft Rewards points to pay for it. You can earn the needed points pretty quick between now and Oct. Could the 9600X3D be a Micro Center exclusive part? Adam thinks so, but I don’t. We won’t know until the official announcement, though (which seems likely). What is confirmed is the coming Ryzen 5 5500X3D, an exclusive to Latin America…and the unfortunately rapid-climbing DDR4 memory prices. If you’re hanging on to an older Ryzen 5000 chip and want more RAM, upgrade ASAP.  Adam loves performance info—a detail that we learn while discussing the new performance monitoring stats in the Steam Beta’s overlay. (Meanwhile, Will doesn’t want much to do with them, unless he’s troubleshooting. I respect it.) Of interest to me: the granularity of the data. Steam displays FPS counters not just for your actual frame rate, but the display frame rate generated by DLSS, FSR, or XESS. Its approach to CPU and GPU perf, as well as memory usage, digs in similarly deep. Will the Xbox console as we know it go the way of the dodo? In Adam’s opinion: Yes. Despite a newly announced extended partnership between AMD and Microsoft for hardware, he argues that the ROG Xbox Ally X signals Microsoft moving to a more hands-off approach. We’ll see a gaming version of Windows that applies to a variety of devices, from handhelds to all kinds of larger PCs. I’m not nearly as convinced yet, though it is clear Microsoft’s approach to Xbox as just a console is over. As for our Q&A section of the show: Viewers ask us some tough questions, including if we have faith in businesses lasting long enough to fulfill their warranties—and if we trust groups pledging to create security patches for unsupported operating systems. One fun question from regular Ivan R: Are random Linux flash drives on a show floor safer than floor candy? (Choice quote from the resulting discussion, in relation to a prank Will once played: “A clown car of thumb drives.”) Missed our live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd YouTube channel, and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real-time!  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 interesting nerd news A quieter week for news, but a few stories stood out. On the good side: a glorious PC dedicated to a Pixar franchise of my youth. (Creak, creak.) But on the rougher side, I’m not looking forward to the change to Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death. No thanks, I hate it.Microsoft MSI’s Toy Story gaming PC is glorious: You can relive 1995 in the best way with a fully themed Toy Story build from MSI. My only complaint: Why does only Taiwan get this good stuff? Legendary Sound Blaster ISA sound card gets a driver update 30 years later: ISA. There’s a name I haven’t heard in years. Should PCs smell good? Adam asks this completely trick question (IMO) of our friend Steve Burke over at Gamers Nexus. As our colleague Michael Crider puts it, off-gassing is not an appealing term, and that’s what Adam is hyping here. Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models: As a book lover, this news filled me with pain. Especially on the back of news that AI companies don’t need permission from authors to train their models on their books. I’m no lawyer, but the idea that training an AI to write in someone’s exact voice doesn’t quite fit the bill of a transformative work to me. Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death is…dead: In an F-U to everyone saddled with informal tech support for loved ones, Microsoft is officially killing off the BSOD in favor of a black screen. Can’t wait to have phone calls where you have to ask for clarification if your grandfather has a black screen (because no video signal) or a Black Screen (of death). Rare Franken-GPU has both AMD and Nvidia branding: Mistakes happen, as a seemingly irate buyer of a Radeon RX 9070 XT discovered. The more interesting discovery via the TFN Discord—the phrase “beyond acceptable” is not as widely known to others as I thought. Bill Gates and Linux creator Linus Torvalds finally met for the first time: World didn’t implode. I also checked outside my window for pigs with wings. That’s all for this week—I’m going to spend now until the next newsletter shivering my buns off, in stark contrast to the eastern side of the U.S. If it’s hot in your region, stay safe and cool out there! Alaina Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Nice-looking design and good build quality Fine desktop performance Could be a great deal on sale Cons Display is on the dull side Low battery life Low graphics performance Speakers disappoint Our Verdict The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 has a chassis that feels good to hold, but the display and the internals disappoint. At $769, it just feels too expensive for this experience. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 is a 15-inch budget touchscreen laptop, and we tested a $769 configuration available through Costco. I’m generally a fan of Lenovo laptops, but this one isn’t up to the standard I expect from them. While this laptop does have a nice design and solid build quality, it feels like so many corners have been cut — and the price has crept up enough — that the resulting product isn’t a great deal. This is the kind of product that makes ‘budget’ feel like a warning, and here’s why. Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3: Specs The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 has an Intel Core 5 210H CPU. While this is an Intel Core (Series 2) processor, it’s based on last year’s Raptor Lake hardware rather than this year’s Lunar Lake hardware. That means you won’t find a neural processing unit (NPU) for Copilot+ PC features and other AI tasks here. You also won’t find the improved power efficiency and dramatically boosted integrated graphics Lunar Lake delivered here, either. Model number: 15IRH10R (83K4000RUS) CPU: Intel Core 5 210H Memory: 16 GB DDR5 RAM Graphics/GPU: Intel Graphics NPU: None Display: 15.3-inch 1920×1200 IPS display with 60Hz refresh rate and touch screen Storage: 1 TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD Webcam: 1080p webcam with physical privacy shutter Connectivity: 1x USB Type-C (USB 5Gbps), 2x USB Type-A (USB 5Gbps), 1x HDMI 1.4, 1x combo audio jack, 1x SD card reader, 1x power connector Networking: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 Biometrics: IR camera for facial recognition with Windows Hello Battery capacity: 60 Watt-hours Dimensions: 13.52 x 9.43 x 0.74 inches Weight: 3.59 pounds MSRP: $769 as tested The design and build quality are nice, but the price of $769 just feels too high for a machine where nothing really shines. Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3: Design and build quality IDG / Chris Hoffman The laptop’s design is quite nice. It’s made of plastic — no metal chassis here — but that smooth plastic feels fine and there’s nothing creaky or low-quality feeling here. In its “Cosmic Blue” color scheme, it’s a nice dark hue that has more of a blue scheme in the light. It’s a modern Lenovo design that looks a lot like higher-end Lenovo laptops. The hinge feels solid and opens to 180 degrees if you want to lie the machine flat, although I need both hands to open the laptop. It’s a perfectly serviceable design. It doesn’t look cheap. This being a budget-priced consumer laptop, there are a few popups right out of the box — but you can uninstall McAfee antivirus, for example, and dismiss the other notifications. Those help keep the price down. It’s annoying out of the box, but it’s fine. Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3: Keyboard and trackpad IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 has an okay keyboard complete with a number pad at the right — I like having that number pad on larger laptops like this one, but some people may prefer skipping the number pad. It has a backlight, too. The keyboard feels reasonable. Lenovo laptops tend to have good keyboards, and this is comfortable enough, but it’s also a little mushy for a Lenovo keyboard. While typing, I notice the plastic around the keys pushes down into the chassis as I bottom out the keys. It contributes to that slightly mushy feeling. It’s fine for a budget laptop, but I eye that price and wonder whether this is truly in the budget price range. The trackpad feels nice. It’s more to the left than it is on many laptops, but that centers it below the primary keyboard area. The surface is nice and smooth, but of course it’s plastic — a glass trackpad just feels smoother. The click-down action feels good to me. Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3: Display and speakers IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3’s 15.3-inch 1920×1200 IPS display is the weakest part of the experience. At 300 nits of brightness, it’s on the dim side on paper. But the display feels unusually dim — and not just dim, but the colors feel rather dull. I cranked it up to 100 percent brightness and still feel like I want to have it brighter. The anti-glare coating does work well. But a higher resolution would be nice at this size — or at least a panel with more vibrant colors and better contrast. The 60Hz refresh rate here is also rather low-end, but it’s the least of my concerns with this display. This is a touch-screen laptop — the touch screen works well, of course. A touch screen is always nice to have. The speakers are also lacking. They’re on the quiet side, and the audio quality is rather tinny. I listen to both Steely Dan’s Aja and Daft Punk’s Get Lucky on Spotify when I review laptop speakers. Both the instrument separation in Aja and the bass in Get Lucky were unusually bad for laptop speakers. While the build quality and design are good, this is a budget laptop through and through. Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3: Webcam, microphone, biometrics IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 has a 1080p camera with a physical privacy shutter — which is great to see. The webcam itself doesn’t feel particularly special — the colors feel washed out. Still, it’s a perfectly serviceable webcam if you need the occasional video meeting. I’ve seen people in surprisingly senior positions use much worse webcams in their meetings! The dual-array microphones here don’t impress, either — they picked up my voice fine, but the sound quality wasn’t particularly great. The Lenovo IdeaPad 3 slim has an IR camera for facial recognition with Windows Hello, so you can sign in with your face. This works well! And I’m pleased to see facial recognition hardware here. Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3: Connectivity IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 does have a decent selection of ports for a budget laptop. On the right side, this machine has a USB Type-A port and a full-size SD card reader. On the left side, Lenovo includes a power connector (this machine doesn’t charge via USB-C, like many other laptops) along with a second USB Type-A port, an HDMI 1.4 out port, a USB Type-C port, and a combo audio jack. It’s nice to see HDMI out along with multiple USB Type-A ports and an SD card slot. This machine supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 — no future-proof Wi-Fi 7 or Bluetooth 5.4 here. While this is certainly enough for many people, it all feels a bit low-end when so many laptops are shipping with support for Thunderbolt 4, HDMI 2.1 out, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4. Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3: Performance The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 performs fine in day-to-day tasks like browsing the web, using Office apps, listening to music on Spotify (assuming you have headphones,) and using other typical Windows desktop apps. While the Intel Core 5 210H processor here isn’t a speed demon, it’s more than good enough for typical Windows desktop use. As always, we ran the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs. IDG / Chris Hoffman First, we run PCMark 10 to get an idea of overall system performance.  With an overall PCMark 10 score of 5,763, the IdeaPad Slim 3 comes a decent way behind more expensive laptops with high-end CPUs. IDG / Chris Hoffman Next, we run Cinebench R20. This is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. Since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage. The IdeaPad Slim 3 produced a multi-threaded score of 3,270 here. The Intel Core 5 210H with its eight cores (four performance cores and four efficiency cores) didn’t produce big numbers on this multithreaded benchmark — which doesn’t represent real-world use unless you have a demanding and multithreaded CPU-heavy workload. IDG / Chris Hoffman We also run an encode with Handbrake. This is another heavily multithreaded benchmark, but it runs over an extended period. This demands the laptop’s cooling kick in, and many laptops will throttle and slow down under load. The Intel Core 5 210H in this machine finished the encode process in 2,330 seconds, which is nearly 39 minutes. That’s a long time — but again, this isn’t the kind of machine you buy if you’re looking to run intensive CPU-heavy workloads. IDG / Chris Hoffman Next, we run a graphical benchmark. This isn’t a gaming laptop, but it’s still good to check how the GPU performs. We run 3Dmark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance. Meteor Lake’s integrated Intel Graphics here really dragged this machine down. With a score of 3Dmark Time Spy score of 1,164, this is three to four times slower than modern laptops with Intel Lunar Lake’s Arc graphics hardware. If you want to play the occasional game or run a GPU-intensive app, this aging platform is a major drawback. Overall, while the IdeaPad Slim 3 did a fine job of running typical desktop applications, its performance doesn’t shine. The multithreaded performance isn’t a big deal here, but the low integrated graphics performance hurts. Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3: Battery life The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 has a 60 Watt-hour battery, which isn’t particularly huge but is reasonable — Lenovo could’ve gone down to a 50 Watt-hour battery to save on cost. IDG / Chris Hoffman To benchmark the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the laptop suspends itself. We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for our battery benchmark. This is a best-case scenario for any laptop since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this. The machine lasted for an average of 561 minutes — that’s nearly nine and a half hours — before suspending itself. That may seem like an impressive number, but it means that it has no hope of making it through an eight-hour workday in real use. The combination of the less power-efficient Raptor Lake hardware and a 60 Watt-hour battery life sees to that. But this machine looks less impressive because Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm have made huge strides in power efficiency since Raptor Lake’s release. This used to be normal. But by mid-2025, you can do much better. Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3: Conclusion When I review laptops, I like to ask “Who is this for?”. Even if a laptop doesn’t make sense for most people, there’s usually someone who will love it. But when I look at the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3, I really don’t get it. The design and build quality are nice, and it offers reasonable desktop performance and a better-than-average port selection, unless you scrutinize the specs too closely. But the price of $769 just feels too high for a machine where nothing really shines. If the display looked better or at least wasn’t so dull, I think I could see the argument for this machine. When I look at PCWorld’s list of the best laptops, I see both budget laptops that are much less expensive — and laptops in a similar price range that offer a better experience. On the other hand, if you don’t need all that much from your PC and you find this on sale for less, it’ll do okay. But I can’t recommend the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 at its retail price. Read...

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TL;DR: Save over 60% on this AI-powered video editing suite, now less than $36 for lifetime access. Looking for a do-it-all video tool that won’t slow you—or your PC—down? VideoProc Converter AI has just landed with a lifetime family license deal for only $35.99 (reg. $119.90). Whether you’re trimming gameplay footage, compressing large files, or using AI to enhance old video clips, this powerhouse software covers it all in one clean interface. Built for Windows users, VideoProc stands out with its full GPU acceleration, meaning smoother, faster performance even when working with massive 4K or HD files. It’s compatible with over 420 formats and supports AI-powered features like video upscaling, noise reduction, and frame interpolation—perfect for upgrading legacy footage or tweaking YouTube-ready content. The “family license” part? That lets you install it on up to five PCs—great if you’ve got a battle station at home, a work laptop, or want to hook up a sibling (or three). This one-time purchase to VideoProc gives you a lifetime license, so there are no recurring fees or surprise renewals. If you’re into editing, streaming, or just want to batch-convert old files without a fuss, this deal is worth grabbing while it lasts. Grab your VideoProc lifetime license for just $35.99 while supplies last. VideoProc Converter AI: Lifetime Family License (For Windows) See Deal StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

I like to try out new ways of doing things to boost productivity, and what I’ve discovered is that even small changes in how I use Windows can achieve big results. One thing I’ve recently started using is Snap — basically a formalized way to “snap” windows to sections of the screen — in Windows 10/11 and it’s really changed how fast I can work. How so? Well, I used to be the king of having multiple browser windows open that I would arrange around my screen like wayward clouds. That setup caused a bunch of problems: The windows would have to be relatively small and that meant they were hard to tell apart; the information in them wasn’t scaled to fit; and, they weren’t snapped into place so they would move about randomly with my clicking. I’d end up just expanding them and in doing so obscure my other windows. Then I’d try to return to what I was doing but forget where I left off — and that muddled process would take up valuable work time. But with Windows’ Snap feature, I now have my main working app open, and then neatly place other windows I need for reference around it in a more accessible way. I find there’s enough viewing space to fit 2 to 3 of the most useful windows in, and they snap into place so I can just scroll and not have to worry about searching for the scroll bars or accidentally moving the windows. It’s just so much easier to navigate a multiple browser window experience this way. There are a couple of different configurations for Windows Split Screen Mode. But by far the most common are the 2- 3- and 4-window split screen setups. Here’s how to do a simple 2-window split screen, from which you’ll be able to glean how to do the other configurations. 2-window split screen setup (Windows 10/11) In Windows navigate to Settings > System > Multitasking and make sure the Snap Windows toggle is turned on. Now just drag each window or application you want to use in your split screen to the very edges of each side of your display until they snap into place. You can then resize the windows to fit how you like them. Although just be aware when working with apps that some apps will be limited in the maximum size they can expand to. Alternatively, you can use keyboard shortcuts to snap your windows into place. Open the first window you want to snap and hold the Windows key + the left arrow key. Now open the second window and hold the Windows key + the right arrow key. Dominic Bayley / Foundry And that’s it! You can repeat the steps above for a 3- and 4-window split screen setup. But note: If you’re using shortcut keys, you may need to use multiple arrow keys + the Windows key to get the windows to go where you want them in these split screen setup types. A 3-window split screen setup will look like the image below. Generally, I’ll snap my left window into place first, which acts as an anchor for the other two windows. A 3-window split screen setup  Dominic Bayley / Foundry Windows 11 makes it easier In Windows 11 you can also just hover your mouse cursor over the maximize / restore icon in the upper right of your browser window, which will give you a selection of split screen configurations (see below). You can then fill in your selected configuration one window at a time! Dominic Bayley / Foundry Thanks for reading today’s tip. If you want more useful tips like this one delivered to your inbox every week, be sure to subscribe to our PCWorld Try This newsletter! Read...

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