The dire state of desktop PCs: ‘If you want performance, you have to pay for it’

RAM shortages, SSD shortages, Nvidia shortages, possible shortages of Intel CPUs — 2026 is off to a rough start. If that’s not enough, consider what AMD and Intel have to offer us in new desktop processors throughout this year. It’s not much at all.

After a thrilling launch of its Core Ultra 300 (Panther Lake) chips, Intel is looking ahead to its upcoming “Arrow Lake Refresh” processors. But, as the name suggests, there might not be a whole lot there. Even AMD’s Ryzen AI 400 (Gorgon Point) chips, which include options for desktop PCs, also look like an incremental update.

Now, new rumors have surfaced about the chips consumers should really care about. The upcoming Intel “Nova Lake” desktop processor, which was originally due at the end of 2026, as well as AMD’s “Olympic Ridge” with Zen 6, might launch in 2027 instead. That leaves DIY builders with what, exactly? Not much in the way of new chips during 2026.

Instead, the vibe is looking backwards. Intel has previously said that consumers were seeking out older, more powerful chips. AMD’s AM4 platform is being asked to hang on for just a while longer, while consumers scramble for (somewhat) cheaper DDR4 memory and mine yard sales for older hard drives. To think!

“My main takeaway is that people have become very accustomed to the PC waterfall: getting more performance every year at the same price,” said Dean McCarron, principal at Mercury Research. “That’s not going to happen this year. If you want performance, you’re going to have to pay for it. And if you’re trying to stay at the same price, you’re not going to get the same kind of performance boost.”

Does it all leave you with a slightly sour taste in your mouth? Let’s recap what we can expect in desktop PCs for 2026, based on what we know now.

Intel: Arrow Lake Refresh

Officially, Intel has not announced anything regarding the Arrow Lake Refresh. A key leak occurred earlier this month, when retailer Newegg reportedly published details of three Arrow Lake Refresh chips on its site: the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus ($357.12), the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus ($245.92), and the Core Ultra 5 250KF ($227.38). (The “Plus” helps identify the new chips.) Whether those prices are accurate or not remains to be seen.

Alex Esteves / Foundry

We know a bit more about the top-end 270K Plus via a public Geekbench listing, as published by Tom’s Hardware. It’s a 3.70GHz chip with a total of 24 cores, with (presumably) 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. (Geekbench, a benchmark, typically requires anyone who uses its benchmark to publish results to a searchable, public database.)

That’s slightly more than the existing Core Ultra 7 265K, the Arrow Lake processor, with 8 performance cores and 12 efficiency cores. It also has a top (not base) clock speed of 5.5GHz. Intel charged $394 for that chip at launch, incidentally, though Amazon now sells it at a 30 percent discount (about $280).

The Geekbench benchmark indicates that Arrow Lake Refresh will be a socketed processor compatible with the Socket 1851 socket used by the original Arrow Lake processor. That means consumers will be able to replace the older chip with the newer.

But will the performance justify the upgrade? Let’s look at what we’ve seen.

The first Geekbench score reported for the 270K Plus Arrow Lake Refresh chip was 3,235 for the single-core benchmark and 21,638 for the multi-core score. Unfortunately, it’s possible to find 265K scores that are higher than this. However, when comparing a sample 265K score from about the same timeframe as the 270K Plus submission (assuming similar driver software), two sample systems using the same motherboard generated single-core scores of 2,647 and 3,081 and multicore scores of 16,632 and 21,592.

All this means is that there could be considerable variance. That’s between a five and 20 percent difference in the single-core result between the older Arrow Lake and the latest Arrow Lake Refresh, and a 0.2 percent to 26 percent difference in the multi-core score. (This could also be testing on wall power versus battery on Arrow Lake’s mobile parts.) That’s a huge swing.

Adam Patrick Murray & Will Smith / PCWorld

You may have thought, as I did, that Arrow Lake sold poorly based on the chip’s poor reviews and customers asking for older Raptor Lake chips instead. That’s not true, McCarron said. Arrow Lake was overshadowed in part by how successful and profitable the older 13th- and 14th-gen Core chips were, but when Intel migrated the manufacturing node to its server chips, Raptor Lake went with it, leaving Arrow Lake instead. And it sold, but not as well as Raptor Lake.

“I don’t think Intel really needs to do anything [with Raptor Lake Refresh],” McCarron said. “I’m sure people would like the power consumption to be different, or its performance to be different, but they don’t have to do anything, as it’s already happening.”

Still, people apparently bought Raptor Lake because it was there. Twitter/X leaker @momomo_us puts the launch date of Arrow Lake Refresh on March 23. We’ll see if the new chip is as successful.

AMD: Ryzen AI 400, plus more of the same

AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series (both the 9000X chips as well as the market-leading X3D series like the Ryzen 9 9950X3D) aren’t going away; they’ll carry AMD through 2026 in the desktop space. They’re the clear leader in performance right now, and one of the few risks customers face is that for some reason they’ll sell out, as they did initially. Otherwise, AMD’s market share has steadily risen thanks to these excellent chips.

There’s just one thing: they’re old, relatively speaking. AMD launched the Ryzen 9000 X3D at the end of 2024, and the killer Ryzen 9 9950X3D dropped a year ago. But just one chip, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, was announced at CES, and it’s unclear if any more will arrive anytime soon. They’re all based on Zen 5 and the scariest rumor of late has been that the “Olympic Ridge” desktop debut of Zen 6 will have to wait until CES 2027 for an introduction. That’s a loooong way away.

AMD

Instead, there’s the Ryzen AI 400, which also traverses the mobile space as well as the desktop. AMD has confirmed that socketed Ryzen AI 400 processors for desktops would arrive as well.

Historically, this has been a bit of a gray area. Intel promised us that we’d see a desktop version of its Core Ultra 100 series, Lunar Lake, then clarified that it would just mean a soldered-down version for all-in-ones instead. (And if there were, there weren’t many.) AMD has said the Ryzen AI 400 / Gorgon Point will be available for traditional socketed desktops, specifically the existing AM5 socket.

AMD launched seven Ryzen AI 400 chips at CES 2026, including a pair of HX processors at the top end. It’s not clear whether they’ll all be available on the desktop.

In any event, little has changed from the admittedly good performance of the Ryzen AI 300, which slightly exceeded the rest of its competition in the mobile space. All of AMD’s Ryzen AI 400s include up to 12 cores and 24 threads, and all use the Zen 5 architecture. Save for a faster memory speed and more AI TOPS, there’s not much difference from the earlier chip. Desktop PCs with a Ryzen AI 400 inside them will qualify for Copilot+ status, but Microsoft has basically granted Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite most-favored-nation status in that regard.

From a performance standpoint, we know something about these chips, too. The Geekbench database also includes a number of benchmarks for the 10-core Ryzen AI 9 465, all running on the Asus Zenbook S16. The scores imply that the laptop was tested on battery and on wall power: as high as 1,538 on single-core testing, versus 9,001 on multicore. On what appears to be wall power, the most recent score at press time was 2,841 for single-core performance, and 13,705 for multi-core.

If true, that’s pretty bad news for AMD on paper compared to Intel’s Arrow Lake Refresh: 2,841 vs. 3,041 (single-core) and 13,705 vs 21,592 (multicore). Ryzen would give up an advantage in single-core applications, such as running the operating system, unzipping files, and some games, as well as a big gap would exist in multithreaded applications. It’s unclear, of course, if these numbers will hold up in real-world testing.

Given that AMD has already announced the Ryzen AI 400 chips, we’d expect them to officially launch soon.

The sleeper here could be another AMD chip entirely: the Ryzen AI Max+, which has appeared in both laptops and tablets as well as desktops like the Framework Desktop. However, my review of the Framework Desktop and its superb Max+ 395 chip inside it was performed in the halcyon days of last August, when AI was taking hold but there was still enough RAM to go around. The AI Max+ chip I reviewed was designed to gobble up RAM — 128GB (!) of LP-DDR5X (!) soldered to the motherboard (!) — which seems kind of insane right about now. The AI Max+ certainly wins on paper, but in the real world it suffers from the same problems other desktop PCs do.

Are Qualcomm or Nvidia wild cards? Not likely

Can Qualcomm zoom in and save the day? Well, maybe — but so far, any promises it has made about socketed desktops haven’t materialized, and we have yet to see the Snapdragon X2 Elite, either.

A big wild card is the Nvidia N1 and N1X. Supposedly, the partnership with Mediatek and its Arm core will produce the first laptops this year, but both companies have been very silent about the N1 and its high-performance offshoot, the N1X. It’s likely that Panther Lake was designed knowing the N1 would eventually challenge it. But still — laptops. An N1 mini PC sounds quite reasonable, but still isn’t the traditional desktop you might be hoping for.

Otherwise, things are still rough. The price of DDR5 DRAM may have plateaued a bit, but it’s still roughly five times what it once was. DDR4 isn’t much better and can vary depending on capacity and speed.

SSD prices aren’t getting any better, either. According to PCPartPicker’s storage trends, you’re essentially paying double what you would have in November, when we warned that you had better grab what deals you could find on storage and memory before they disappeared. You’re probably aware that hard drives are selling out, too.

That’s not to say that desktop PC sales will suffer. In fact, Mercury’s fourth-quarter data shows that availability was better in desktops than laptops, McCarron said. Corporations will still refresh their PCs, just because they have to. Instead, we’re moving to a supply-constrained market, he said, where people will buy what they can, not what they want. Grim.

Budget PCs will be especially vulnerable, McCarron predicted, and someone looking at a low-end PC should investigate a refurbished computer instead.

In a word, it’s bleak. Unless you have a couple of bitcoins burning a hole in your wallet, building a desktop PC in 2026 seems like a lost cause. With what’s going on in the mobile space — with Panther Lake, the Nvidia N1, and maybe Qualcomm’s next-gen X2 Elite — maybe it’s worth calling 2026 the year of the laptop, instead.