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Digital Foundry's Best Gaming Hardware 2025: Switch 2, GPD Win 5, RTX 5090, Ryzen 9950X3D + More! (Patreon)

Published:
2025-12-31 19:26:46
Edited:
2026-01-04 14:29:22
Imported:
2025-12

Content

An early - depending on your geographical location - "Happy New Year" to all of Digital Foundry's Supporters, and a final piece of early access before we sign off on the year of our lord, 2025. Many, many thanks for your help in making what we do possible. There will be challenging times ahead in 2026, but with your support, we've got this - and we've still got a lot of very cool things we want to do!

But for now, the video and here's the blurb: In the last DF Direct video of the year, Rich, Oliver and Alex join forces to discusses their experiences of the best gaming hardware of 2025. Handhelds dominate, and while Switch 2's mega sales cannot be denied, Rich makes the case for the crazy GPD Win 5, while Oliver opts for the SteamOS-based Lenovo Legion Go S. Beyond portables, it's all about the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, RTX 5090, the Blackwell and RDNA 4 launches in general and - finally - green shoots of hope in what looks to be a grim 2026.

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Files

Digital Foundry's Best Gaming Hardware 2025: Switch 2, GPD Win 5, RTX 5090, Ryzen 9950X3D + More!

Digital Foundry is now fully independent! Join the DF Supporter Program and support the team: https://bit.ly/3jEGjvx In the last DF Direct video of the year, Rich, Oliver and Alex join forces to discusses their experiences of the best gaming hardware of 2025. Handhelds dominate, and while Switch 2's mega sales cannot be denied, Rich makes the case for the crazy GPD Win 5, while Oliver opts for the SteamOS-based Lenovo Legion Go S. Beyond portables, it's all about the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, RTX 5090, the Blackwell and RDNA 4 launches in general and - finally - green shoots of hope in what looks to be a grim 2026. Visit the new Digital Foundry website: https://www.digitalfoundry.net Go here to check out DF merch! https://store.digitalfoundry.net Subscribe for more Digital Foundry: http://bit.ly/DFSubscribe 0:00:00 Introduction 0:00:53 GPD Win 5 0:11:07 Asus ROG Xbox Ally X 0:15:40 Lenovo Legion Go S 0:18:44 MSI Claw 8 AI + 0:19:45 Nintendo Switch 2 0:28:59 AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D 0:38:52 Nvidia Blackwell 0:51:11 AMD RDNA 4 0:59:58 Expectations for 2026

Comments

PaperMartin

Reports of the RTX 5090 going from $2000 to $5000 btw

BespokeEP

It's not as if people were really buying 5090's in the first place.. I've always found it hilarious when people talk about PC's being more powerful than consoles and yet the overwhelming majority of PC gamers actually own a PC that is weaker than a PS5/Series X. And for some reason they laugh at consoles for being weaker. Not saying you are, just more of a general statement to say, realistically this price increase doesn't matter at all

PaperMartin

Other more popular GPUs will almost certainly see similar price increases

digitalfoundry

Who knows what is going to happen in 2026 - but I think it's fair to say that price increases on 32GB of GDDR7 will not justify a $3000 price hike. Let's see eh? And hope journalists ask the right questions to execs at CES.

MattGPT

Interesting in the 9950X3D discussion because I find the limited PCIE lanes a real annoyance. I want a full 16x 5.0 lanes for the GPU and the ability to slot in multiple NVME drives without losing speed across some/all of them. Is it really that costly for them to add more PCIE lanes?

digitalfoundry

The key thing for me is finding a board where instead of just a 16x PCIe slot using CPU lanes, I can have two 8x PCIe slots instead.

MattGPT

Bifurcation does get messy, it seems ok a lot of boards adding an NVME to one of the slots also halves the GPU lanes. I bought one of the Asus Hyper M.2 card without thinking it through, thinking I could use it in the other PCIe slot, turns out all of that is a total mess so it is sat in a box doing nothing. If 8TB NVME drivers were reasonable then it would matter less, but they are silly money and only seem to be getting more expensive so I have stuck with 4TB. Though I guess for you gents needing to run capture cards as well there is no easy fix. Personally more lanes is the solution, but if not just clearing up what does what, where it bifurcates, where it turns slots off when something is in another would be better.

Konic & Snuckles

Oh my god. STOP. MAKING. VIDEOS. PRIVATE. It's infuriating! I get Patreon notifications that a new video drops. I add it to my custom DF playlist on YT. Then two days later, POOF, it's gone! Then I have to go figure out which episode of yours I am missing. Just stop it! Please, please, PLEASE, just keep these early uploads active and Link-only, not private. Your new practice of privating them is driving me nuts and making me consider canceling my membership.

Ian

The ergonomics on the switch 2 are horrible handheld. But if you put a grip on it (and are prepared to spend a little - I went with the zengrip 2) then imo it’s better than any pc handheld to hold. Yes the sticks are a bit small but stick grips fix that and the triggers not close to proper analog ones but it’s still a very nice device to use handheld with the right grip.

MattGPT

It looks more like a wafer/fab capacity issue than the RAMageddon issue. Likely the whole stack will see MSRP rise, but more so at the top end, I still cannot seeing the 5090 FE being $5k though.

digitalfoundry

I'm really sorry this is annoying for you, but the bottom line is that early access on long videos usually means that the videos may have minor errors, things we're not happy with or things the Patreon audience point out that should be changed before public release. Early access is a valuable tool in quality control before final, public releases - so all I can really recommend here is that you wait until an early access video is public before adding to your playlist? Would I be right in assuming that your playlist is private? I'm guessing so as a public playlist with early access videos is not great.

Ian

To an extent yes. But of course the switch is built to be like that. It’s a naked flat tablet that is thinner than any other gaming handheld with controllers that clip on and off and can be docked. In essence Nintendo are making it built so that if you want to add ergonomics to make it better handheld you can. I think that’s necessary for its hybrid nature and to preserve its ‘console’ likeness. If you make it a lot bigger and add grips - it starts to become more like chunky pc hardware and the dock gets bigger…

Ian

What is the status of the steam machine simulated hardware video? Or did that get lost in the Christmas rush? I’m interested in why it might be limited to 4 lane PCIE as some have suggested as that would be pretty bad wouldn’t it!