Nick Evanson

Nick Evanson

Hardware Writer

Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its PC gaming section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open-world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?

Latest articles by Nick Evanson

A generic promotional image for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus processor
Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon X2 Plus, with up to 35% more single-core CPU performance and 29% faster GPUs than X Plus chips

By Nick Evanson Published

CES 2026 It'd be kinda nice to see some Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops first, though.

CES 2026
A promotional image for the Asus ROG G1000 gaming PC
Asus goes all out with its new ROG G1000 gaming PC: The 'world's first' to have a holographic fan system built into the case

By Nick Evanson Published

CES 2026 For those times when RGB just isn't bling enough.

CES 2026
A generic image of an AMD Ryzen AI Max processor, against an abstract orange-coloured background.
The AMD Ryzen AI Max range gets two more entries, one of which looks perfect for the ultimate in handheld PC gaming

By Nick Evanson Published

CES 2026 It's certainly better for gaming than the 'new' Ryzen AI 400 chips, that's for sure.

CES 2026
A mockup image for the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, with the 5 digit colored in red
AMD launches its fastest gaming CPU yet, though the new Ryzen 7 9850X3D is clocked just 8% higher than the 9800X3D

By Nick Evanson Published

CES 2026 And AMD tells us to only expect 2 - 3% higher performance on average, 5% at best if a game really likes higher clocks.

CES 2026
Ray Reconstruction in Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0
Love it or hate it, but frame generation is the one major graphics technology that really needs improving in 2026

By Nick Evanson Published

Next gen Upscaling is almost perfect. Now it's frame gen's time.

32 Comments
Next gen
A close-up, cropped photo of a TP-Link Deco BE68 mesh router, with its retail box partially visible in the background, and a PC Gamer Personal Pick 2025 logo in the top left corner.
Out of all the new hardware that has passed through my hands in 2025, nothing has made an impact like a certain Wi-Fi 7 router has

By Nick Evanson Published

Gear of the Year No joke, it's been the best upgrade I've done in years.

15 Comments
Gear of the Year
A image with the central text of 'Best Motherboard 2025' and a PC Gamer logo, with a multi-coloured background, showing an out-of-focus motherboard through a diamond-shaped cut-out in the background.
PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming motherboard of 2025

By Nick Evanson Published

Gear of the year Motherboards are the only way that Intel stands any chance of winning an award this year.

Gear of the year
An image showing 'Best CPU 2025' in the centre of a multi-colored background, with a diamond shape cut-out showing a blurring image of a CPU in a motherboard.
PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming CPU of 2025

By Nick Evanson Published

Gear of the year It's another slam dunk for AMD, of course, but that doesn't mean there's an obvious winner.

Gear of the year
Battlefield 6 beta queues, errors, issues: Soldiers running away from a collapsing building.
Three shining examples of brilliant PC game development in 2025

By Nick Evanson Published

Best dev …and three not-so-shining examples. Oh dear.

Best dev
A screenshot of the PC version of Grounded 2, using the game's Photo Mode, with a stylised overlay on top showing the PC Gamer logo and the phrase 'Game of the Year: Personal Pick'
Out of all the new games I've played in 2025, Grounded 2 deserves a special nod simply because it makes me like a genre that I really don't like: multiplayer survival

By Nick Evanson Published

🏆 It's not me, it's you. I don't like you.

🏆
Samsung Hwaseon S3 and S4 manufacturing plants
It's an older node, sir, but it checks out: Samsung appears to have scooped a deal with Intel to make its next generation of motherboard chipsets in its 8 nm fabs

By Nick Evanson Published

News Ultra-tiny, cutting-edge processes aren't needed for platform controllers.

News
Intel's Fab 28.
Securities firm research suggests that Intel is on track to garner chip manufacturing and packaging orders from Apple, Broadcom, Google, and maybe even Nvidia

By Nick Evanson Published

News Intel's 14A process node and die-stacking EMIB are the favoured technologies.

News
The XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT on a set of bookshelves, with various sci-fi novels behind it
AMD stealth-launches a new low power version of its Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card that could be great for a DIY Steam Machine, though it's only shaved 13% off the energy consumption

By Nick Evanson Published

News At 140 W, it sits right between the RTX 5060 and RTX 5050 in terms of power munchies, and just above the Steam Machine's GPU.

News
UL 3DMark new DirectX Raytracing benchmark
Microsoft celebrates 10 years of DirectX 12: A decade of updates to the low-level graphics API but it's still not the master of all things rendering

By Nick Evanson Published

News DirectX 11 hasn't gone anywhere, and don't expect to see DirectX 13 any time soon, either. Or ever, perhaps.

10 Comments
News
Asus ROG Strix B760-F Gaming WiFi M.2 heatsink
Asus tells owners of its Intel motherboards to update the BIOS because they 'may allow unintended access to system memory'

By Nick Evanson Published

News And it's because of pesky DMA protections not being triggered to help out add-in PCIe cards.

News
An generic image of Samsung GDDR7 modules against a background of Samsung silicon wafer diagrams
Nvidia is reportedly looking to cut gaming GPU production by up to 40% in 2026 due to VRAM supply issues, but it's not as bad news as you might think. Not yet, at least

By Nick Evanson Published

News There's already an excess of RTX 50-series cards, for starters.

10 Comments
News
AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card
'Give us the chip. Give us the RAM. Let us have our fun. Let us go nuts': Sapphire's PC gaming evangelist wants AMD 'to get out of the way' when it comes to designing graphics cards

By Nick Evanson Published

News 'I personally wish they would let us be the companies we are in, instead of trying to create the mold.'

News
A photo of the ZSA Voyager ergonomic keyboard, with a ZSA Navigator trackball module attached to the right half
ZSA Voyager + Navigator review

By Nick Evanson Published

Score: 78% Ultra-thin and compact, space-conscious minimalists will want to give this keyboard a look.

Score: 78%
A photo of an MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition, next to its retail box
MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition review

By Nick Evanson Published

Score: 80% Taking one of the most over-the-top, luxury-class AMD motherboards around and making it even more exclusive.

Score: 80%
Intel TSMC outsourcing
MIT electronics researchers develop a new way to fabricate transistors on the backend of finished dies, to keep pushing the limit of chip densities ever higher

By Nick Evanson Published

News It's a bit like chip stacking but on the nanometre scale.

News
A promotional image for the Asus ROG Strix 5K XG27JCG gaming monitor.
If 4K gaming is just too easy for your RTX 5090, then try it on Asus' new 5K ROG Strix display and watch it weep

By Nick Evanson Published

News Or you could just use its 1440p dual-mode option and enjoy the 330 Hz refresh rate.

22 Comments
News
A promotional image for the Jonsbo TF3-360SCB AIO liquid CPU cooler, focusing on its key selling point: four LCD screens.
RAM prices might be sucking all the joy out of building PCs but four-screen AIO coolers go a little way to bringing a smile back on my face

By Nick Evanson Published

News I just think it's neat.

News
A collage of three games (Black Myth: Wukong, Cyberpunk 2077, F1 25) as used to test the performance of AMD's FSR Redstone update
FSR Redstone tested: AMD's long awaited AI-powered frame gen delivers the goods but it's very late to market

By Nick Evanson Published

Redstone released Actually, it's not FSR Redstone. It's all just FSR now because of reasons that only make sense to AMD.

Redstone released
A processed photo of a data center server room, showing racks of computers lit by overhead lights, reflecting off the ground.
It never rains, but it pours: A security bug with a maximum severity rating is putting many of the worlds' servers at risk

By Nick Evanson Published

News Fixes are available, though 'organizations should patch urgently'.

News
Batman
In a surprise change of heart, Nvidia's brought 32-bit PhysX support back to RTX 50-series graphics cards, though only for a select number of games

By Nick Evanson Published

News At least you won't need to dual-GPU your RTX 5090 rig anymore, just to enjoy a bit of physics-heavy Batman.

News
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