Handheld PCs, AI (of course), and what the hell modem means.

It's been a big week in the handheld gaming PC world. You want yourself a Switch-a-like PC then your options just got a whole lot bigger. The Steam Deck was the forerunner, but this week Asus spilled the beans on the ROG Ally, seemingly only $50 more than the top Deck, but potentially three times more powerful. But, as AMD has announced a new chip, a bunch of other handhelds, like the AOKZOE A1 Pro have shown up, too. Exciting.

We've also heard rumours of new, affordable AMD and Nvidia GPUs coming around Computex at the end of May, fun with AI robot dogs and pizza-based AI shenanigans. Meta and Intel have both posted massive losses in financial terms, but both are promising the world in new VR headsets and advanced chip tech.

Lots going on, in other words 😁

Did you know there are words just walking around out there waiting to blow up your day? Words that you thought you knew. Like wi-fi, for example. You thought you had a mutual understanding: you learned the definition of the word, how to spell and pronounce it, and in exchange you could go through life using it without studying the entire history of language. An innocent life! That's how I lived once. And then a portmanteau absolutely wrecked my shit.

$220 for a high-refresh 1440p panel is a great deal, especially for a good one. We've been hands on with the 165Hz Pixio PXC277 Advanced and it does almost everything pretty well. OK, HDR support extremely limited. But at this price, it's a surprisingly sweet all-round gaming monitor.

It's not often that an Alienware gaming rig will pop up with a lot of tech inside it for a surprisingly competitive price, but here we are. This Ryzen Edition R14 comes with what was once the pinnacle of AMD graphics, the RX 6900 XT. It's an RTX 3080-beating card with 16GB VRAM, though without the latent power of DLSS or the RTX 4070's Frame Generation power. The six-core Ryzen 5000-series CPU is a little weak if you're talking about productivity, but you do get 32GB of speedy DDR4 and a full 2TB SSD.

This is the cheaper version of the QD-OLED screen from Alienware we love so much, but don't let that put you off. It's hardly a big shake up for its lower price tag, as it's only 10Hz slower and comes with FreeSync Premium Pro instead of G-Sync Ultimate. If you can handle that, this is the OLED to get.

The Asus ROG Ally has an official launch date of May 11. That's a lot sooner than many of us expected to see the new Steam Deck rival, a wee PC that Asus is promising will "redefine handheld gaming." The company has been seeding us with some solid data ready for its upcoming launch event, including the super-bright 120Hz 7-inch screen's response time, and the machine's confirmed pair of AMD Ryzen Z1-series chips.

We're winning this thing, people, let's stick at it. That's the sentiment as rumours of lower-than-anticipated Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti pricing of $399 emerge and real-world prices of the RTX 4070 edge below MSRP in several markets. First, that RTX 4060 Ti rumour. RedGamingTech reckons the RTX 4060 Ti will arrive next month at $399—the same MSRP as the last-gen RTX 3060 Ti, which of course wasn't available at anything close to MSRP until quite recently.

AMD has confirmed an issue that saw some users Ryzen 7000-series CPUs burn out, and says a fix is on the way from its motherboard partners in the "next few days," if it's not already available. "We have root caused the issue and have already distributed a new AGESA that puts measures in place on certain power rails on AM5 motherboards to prevent the CPU from operating beyond its specification limits, including a cap on SOC voltage at 1.3V," the statement from AMD says.