In this episode of The Full Nerd, Gordon Mah Ung, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, Keith May, and Adam Patrick Murray hash out the best PC hardware of 2021.

It’s immediately fireworks as Gordon nominates Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake as the best CPU of the year and Alaina counters that AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600G should be the pick given the current state of GPUs and its bargain price.

The heated talk bleeds over into the best GPU of the year as Alaina again makes the argument that AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600G gives hope to those who cannot get unobtanium discrete GPUs, while Gordon argues best doesn’t mean settling.

The crew also discusses their picks for best laptop, best accessory, best game, best innovation, and worst trend as we begin to close out 2021, which has been a doozy of a year for the PC.

This episode is brought to you by Avast’s new all-in-one solution, Avast One, which helps keep your identity and actions hidden, stops malware, phishing, and virus attacks, and helps clean up your devices. And because Avast believes essential protection should be available to everyone, a free version of Avast One still includes award-winning free AV, free VPN, free firewall, and much more.

You can witness it all in the video embedded above. You can also watch The Full Nerd episode 197 on YouTube (subscribe to the channel while you’re there!) or listen to it on Megaphone.fm 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 Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or you can point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader to: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/IDG8935300959.

If you want to wear your geekiness on your sleeve, check out our Full Nerd merch! We just rolled out some new designs so you can proudly proclaim that you’re a friend of the show, or your love of 19×10 gaming. (If you know, you know.)

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! 

Author: Gordon Mah Ung, Executive Editor

One of founding fathers of hardcore tech reporting, Gordon has been covering PCs and components since 1998.

Recent stories by Gordon Mah Ung:

Meet LPCAMM2, the fast and efficient new laptop RAM of the futureI’m not afraid of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X ElitePC maker offers a potential fix for crashing Intel CPUs