The Pudgy Nerd awards: Our well-liked PC hardware of 2020

It’s that point of year all over all over again. In this episode of the Pudgy Nerd, Gordon Mah Ung, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, Adam Patrick Murray, and you—the are living Pudgy Nerd viewers—preserve in fierce debate (and espresso swooning) to crown the best probably PC hardware of 2020. And what a year it’s been for PC hardware, though worthy of maybe the most spectacular unusual equipment stays most unlikely to originate.

These aren’t PCWorld’s formal picks—they’re the opinions of the Pudgy Nerd podcast gang alone. We didn’t preserve staff-extensive conferences or form give an explanation for Excel spreadsheets fat of data about every gizmo now we have faith reviewed. As a change, every member of the Pudgy Nerd crew brings a single nominee for every category. Then the community argues, pleads, and deals until we reach a consensus victor. If we are in a position to’t resolve a winner for a category via majority vote, we depend on the are living viewing viewers to reduction damage the tie. You helped preserve a champion in no longer one, but two categories this year. (Subscribe to our YouTube channel in uncover for you to preserve us are living in the lengthy urge.)

To add to the birthday celebration, we also announced the launch of reliable Pudgy Nerd merchandise on the starting up of the level to! That you simply may grab shirts, hoodies, mousepads and more at PCWorld’s Construct By Humans storefront, or hats, beanies, totes, and aprons at our Spreadshirt build.

But the spectacular PC hardware and instrument nominees are the explicit stars right here. The joy of this award level to lies in passionate debate, domestically dialogue—in the fling. That you simply may understanding it all in the video embedded above. That you simply may survey The Pudgy Nerd episode 162 on YouTube or hear to it on Soundcloud whereas you occur to remove the audio alone.

Will have faith to that you just will be attempting to know our favorites without sitting by the fat level to, right here’s a listing of the winners. But the best probably fragment of this episode is the total arguing and cajoling, so tune into the fat reveal whereas you occur to can! Doing so will clue you in to the total listing of nominees—this changed into a banner year for PC hardware. And all over all over again, designate that that is the Pudgy Nerd gang’s well-liked hardware—no longer the total PCWorld staff’s most productive-of picks. Hearty congratulations to the winners and nominees alike.

• Most life like probably CPU of 2020: AMD’s Ryzen 5000 processors, for toppling Intel’s desktop dominance for the foremost time in a truly very lengthy time. AMD has been building steam for a whereas now and commenced firing on all cylinders in 2020.
• Most life like probably graphics card of 2020: Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, a almost flawless 1440p graphics card. It’s the best probably subsequent-gen graphics card without any indispensable compromises for what it’s attempting to preserve out.
• Most life like probably case of 2020: Cooler Grasp MasterBox NR200, a truly more cost-effective and compact case that’s no longer too runt. It looks mountainous, has ample build to suit your wants, and makes runt form reveal builds worthy more accessible than they extinct to be.

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• Most life like probably accessory of 2020: Lian Li Uni Fan SL120, a modular, interlocking fan that will be linked up and urge off a single situation of cables (one fan, one RGB). The plot no longer most productive reduces cable litter, but it indubitably saves time spent on determining the cleanest routing for as many as 8 cables when using RGB followers. They’re so current they’re onerous to get aesthetic now—one thing you don’t hear very usually about case followers.
• Most life like probably laptop laptop of 2020: The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. “To give you a theory of appropriate how spectacular this 3.5-pound, Ryzen 4000-primarily based laptop laptop is, you’re speaking just a few weight class that usually presents you decrease-energy CPUs and GPUs,” we said in our review. “Yet the G14 can hang in CPU performance with laptops that weight 10 pounds.” It’s very a lot more more cost-effective than these heavier methods, too.
• Most life like probably game of 2020: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, a breathtaking technical surprise that units the total world, total with exact-time weather sucked in from Microsoft’s Azure carrier. Flying into the secret agent of a exact-lifestyles storm feels improbable, and Flight Simulator presents a mountainous excuse to blow the grime off your HOTAS flight stick.
• Most life like probably innovation of 2020: Nvidia’s DLSS 2.0. DLSS taps the devoted tensor cores interior Nvidia’s RTX GPUs, using their machine finding out chops to take hang of frames rates and lengthen the resolution you’re ready to play at—a key complement to ray tracing, but a unbelievable relieve in any game that supports it. DLSS 1.0 didn’t ogle mountainous, but the wholly unusual DLSS 2.0 implementation quells beautiful worthy every complaint regarding the foremost model, with worthy sooner performance and vastly improved visuals. It will probably maybe even create your games ogle better than native rendering in the cultured conditions. 
• Worst model of 2020: Lavatory paper launches, which isn’t reasonably the the same as a frequent paper launch. That you simply may’t bewitch most of maybe the most up to date unusual PC merchandise of 2020 for the the same reason you couldn’t bewitch lavatory paper for a big chunk of the year. Manufacturers are cranking hardware out as instant as they’ll, but the demand is suitable crushing. Most other folks hoping to toughen their graphics cards for Cyberpunk 2077 had their desires overwhelmed too, all due to the lavatory paper launches. Hopefully 2021 fixes the matter.

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Occupy a PC- or gaming-connected request? Electronic mail [email protected] and we’ll are attempting and reply to it in the next episode. That you simply may join the PC-connected discussions and depend on us questions about The Pudgy Nerd’s Discord server. In the raze, create obvious to prepare PCWorld on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch to survey future episodes are living and preserve our brains in exact time!