Most of the Steam Deck imitators on the market right now use AMD silicon, specifically the Ryzen Z-series chips. These are the same chips AMD makes for regular laptops, but with different power settings better suited to a compact handheld system. There are handhelds based on Intel silicon (MSI’s Claw is the main one), but Intel hasn’t yet tried making silicon marketed specifically for that purpose.

Today, the company is throwing its hat in the ring with two Intel Arc G-series processors, which will allow gaming handhelds to leverage the company's genuinely quite good Arc B-series integrated GPUs. Intel says that several Arc G-series handhelds will arrive "starting in June 2026, with broader availability throughout the year." These systems will include a new MSI Claw model, a Predator Atlas 8 from Acer, and a device from OneXPlayer.

Intel normally uses its "Arc" branding for integrated and dedicated GPUs, but in this case, the "Arc" brand encompasses the entire chip, including the CPU, GPU, NPU, and other components.

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Valve's Steam Deck handheld has been largely unavailable to buy since mid-February, a victim of the RAM and storage shortages that have been driving up prices for most consumer tech since the fall of 2025. The good news is that the Deck is back in stock on Valve's site and ready to ship in three to five days; the bad news is that it appears to have returned because somebody wished for it on a monkey's paw.

The 512GB version of the OLED Steam Deck now sells for a whopping $789, $240 more than its previous $549 price. The 1TB version (which also includes an anti-glare screen coating, a slightly nicer case, and an "exclusive startup movie and keyboard theme") will now run you $949, a $300 increase from its old $649 price. The old $399 base model with 256GB of storage and the older LCD screen has been discontinued, though this had been announced well before these price increases took effect.

These prices are particularly hard to swallow for a nearly 3-year-old revision of an over-4-year-old handheld PC. If there's a saving grace for Valve, it's that most competing handhelds from the likes of Asus and Lenovo are also pushing or exceeding that $1,000 mark. Of the Deck's major competitors, only the $600 Asus ROG Xbox Ally (and its AMD Ryzen Z2 A processor, which is very similar to the Deck's semi-custom AMD chip) is significantly cheaper than the Steam Deck.

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Shiny new Nvidia apps like the GeForce Experience and the "Nvidia app" have come and gone, but the old Nvidia Control Panel and its rotating green Nvidia logo have existed as an option for managing basic settings since it was originally introduced in 2006.

That's ending with version 610.47 of Nvidia's Game Ready and Studio drivers for GeForce GPUs. Nvidia says the old Control Panel will no longer be installed by default, since "all actively supported Nvidia Control Panel features for GeForce users have been modernized and transitioned" to the new Nvidia app.

"The NVIDIA app contains all of the modern functionality of the NVIDIA Control Panel available for GeForce RTX GPUs, and much more, while running faster and more efficiently," writes Nvidia Technical Marketing Content Editor Andrew Burnes in the drivers' release notes.

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It seems fair to say that Apple's MacBook Neo took the rest of the PC industry by surprise. Companies are used to competing on price and features with $1,000-and-up Apple laptops like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but their $600 and $700 models usually come with cut corners and compromises that are more noticeable than the Neo's. The CEO of Asus admitted to being surprised by the laptop's price (while simultaneously trying to downplay the Neo's value); a Microsoft-backed study comparing PCs to the MacBook Neo included several laptops that can't compete with the Neo's price unless they're deeply discounted.

In the last couple of weeks, we've started to see a more intentional and targeted response to the MacBook Neo from PC makers. These mostly seem to revolve around Intel's low-end Core Series 3 processors, codenamed Wildcat Lake; while Intel's last few generations of low-end chips have mostly been rebrands of older and less power-efficient parts, Wildcat Lake is a new purpose-built budget chip that benefits from Intel's latest CPU and GPU architectures and its 18A manufacturing process. This should help these chips compete better with the Apple A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo.

Many early Wildcat Lake systems have already been announced, though not all have included a price tag, and several have only been announced for the Chinese market as of this writing. Lenovo is planning to launch some IdeaPad Slim models with the new processors, with some optional spec upgrades including 16GB of RAM and a 120 Hz high-refresh-rate display. Asus and HP have also announced some early products.

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It's not an ideal time to be buying a new PC or doing a major upgrade. Price crunches for RAM and storage chips are making all kinds of components more expensive, and the shift to DDR5 in modern Intel and AMD CPUs means that a lot of people would need to pay money to replace their current DDR4 kits if they wanted to step up to a significantly newer, faster CPU and motherboard.

AMD may have something on the horizon for people who are looking to stretch their current PC (and its DDR4 RAM kit) just a little further. Leaks spotted by Tom's Hardware point to the existence of an "AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition," a re-release of a 4-year-old out-of-circulation CPU that might nevertheless be an upgrade for people with older Ryzen CPUs in Socket AM4 motherboards.

The "X3D" in the chip's name signifies that it comes with 64MB of extra L3 cache stacked on top of the main CPU die, bringing the total amount of L3 cache to 96MB. Workloads that benefit from extra cache—including most games—will perform much better on the 5800X3D than they do on the vanilla Ryzen 7 5800X.

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