2024 Australian PC Awards winners: the best of the best in PC

(Image credit: Future)

The time has come for the big reveal – as today we’re announcing the 2024 winners across all categories of the Australian PC Awards!

After exhaustive testing, comparisons, benchmarking and taking into account value, innovation, quality and features, we have our winners. Everything important that goes inside a PC, connects to a PC, or is important to the PC has been rated by the team of experts at TechRadar, PC Gamer APC and PC PowerPlay.

If you’re looking for an upgrade – this is the list you want. And if you’re planning a complete new rig, well you can’t go wrong with choosing the gear here. Maybe you already run something we’ve awarded, in which case you are 100% entitled to feel chuffed about your wise purchase.

The team here extends a big congratulations to all the winners, highly recommended and finalists. If it’s on a list here, it’s good gear!

Words by Ben Mansill, Joel Burgess and Chris Szewczyk.

APCA 2024 sponsors final — (Image credit: Future)

What are the Australian PC Awards?

Our awards cover all the main categories that affect the PC, as well as our special awards:

Excellence Award: Presented to the person, product or technology that advanced the PC more than any other in 2023.

Gold Award: For the best overall company operating in the PC space for 2023. This list includes every one of the finalists across all the other categories – and has been carefully considered by our expert panel of judges.

And of course there must be balance with all things, which leads us to this year’s Epic Fail Award. May the most dismal failure win!

Australian PC Awards Winners 2024

In the absence of a major new platform or socket release, 2023 was a relatively quiet year for new motherboard releases. But that doesn't mean there weren't any new models.

The highlight of 2023 was the release of a wave of refreshed Z790 motherboards. They accompanied Intel's 14th Generation CPU range and they introduced a few new, and welcome features. They'll end up being the best and last LGA 1700 motherboards to be released before Intel switches to the LGA 1851 socket in late 2023 or early 2024.

The headline new feature was the introduction of support for Wi-Fi 7, the next generation networking standard. Of course, they have out of the box support for 14th Generation processors, along with generally beefed up power delivery systems, improved USB capabilities and support for much faster DDR5 memory. Some Z790 refresh boards even unofficially support DDR5-8000 and higher.

Things were relatively quiet on the AMD front, with the entry level A620 chipset being the only new chipset to be released, and it was a quiet launch at that. A620 motherboards are best paired with AMD's 65W-class processors and entry level builds. Most of the B650 and X670 motherboards on the market during 2023 were released in 2022. Not that they're 'old'. A good AM5 motherboard will remain relevant for years to come.

Best Motherboard Maker

All Finalists

Best Value Motherboard

Highly Commended

Asrock Z790 Riptide WiFi

All Finalists

Best Premium Motherboard

Highly Commended

Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Dark Hero

All Finalists

APCA 2024 Graphics cards — (Image credit: Future)

After a tumultuous period during the pandemic and the sudden collapse of demand from miners, the graphics card market is still somewhat struggling for a return to normalcy. Prices remain elevated and it doesn’t help that there's a new and extremely lucrative drag on optimal supply. Of course, we’re talking about AI.

High end cards remain overpriced. Just a few years back, spending $1,000 would have gotten you a flagship card, but now that kind of money will only get you an upper mid-range card. With console supply stabilising in 2023, it's understandably tough for PC gamers to justify spending the really big bucks on high end cards, especially given ongoing cost of living pressures.

Things aren’t that rosier at the more affordable end of the market. Capable options like the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 are essentially entry level GPUs at mid-range prices. Sure, you have good technologies such as DLSS 3, FSR3 and frame generation, but native performance still matters, and spending $500 to $600 on a graphics card from Nvidia or AMD should deliver a little bit more both in terms of base specifications and performance.

Of course, we can't forget Intel either. Though they got off to a rocky start, Intel's Arc cards have come a long way and are definitely worth considering at the budget end of the market after many welcome driver updates.

Best Graphics Card Maker

Highly Commended

Powercolour

All Finalists

Best Value Graphics Card

Highly Commended

Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 7800 XT

All Finalists

Best Premium Graphics Card

Highly Commended

Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090 OC EVA-02 Edition

All Finalists

2023 saw the release of some excellent processors, all the way from the budget end of the market to the high end.

The year started with the launch of Intel's 65W 13th Generation CPUs. There were some gems among them including the excellent Core i5 13400, which remains one of our favourite budget CPUs, but the real star of the show ended up being AMD's value champ, the Ryzen 5 7500F.

AMD's gaming prowess was again on show, with Zen 4 models equipped with stacked cache providing excellent gaming performance and power efficiency. In fact, the gaming performance of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is so good, it can match and beat anything Intel has to offer.

Never write off Intel though. Later in the year we saw the launch of the 14th Generation K-series CPUs. Though in most cases they are essentially overclocked 13th Generation chips, they remain competitive options, even if they're power hungry and run hot when presented with heavy loads.

At the prosumer and enterprise end of the market, AMD continues to excel, presenting Intel with very tough competition that it cannot yet match. The battle resumes in 2024.

Best Value CPU

Highly Commended

Intel Core i5 13400

All Finalists

Best Mid-range CPU

Highly Commended

Intel Core i5-14600K

All Finalists

Best Premium CPU

Highly Commended

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

All Finalists

2023 saw the proliferation of PCI Express 5.0 SSDs. The latest and greatest drives are capable of well over 10GB/s of blazing speed, though they do get a bit hot and require some extravagant cooling to run at their full speeds – an ongoing problem that has yet to be addressed.

With USB Type-C connectivity becoming all but ubiquitous, it's become easier than ever to transfer files between your PC, phone or tablet. Manufacturers took the opportunity to expand their portfolios of USB-C storage products.

And if there's one thing we can say with 100% certainty, it's that the humble mechanical hard drive isn't going away any time soon. As long as the amount of data we generate continues to grow, so will the need for large capacity hard drives to hold it all.

Best Internal Storage Maker

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best External Storage Maker

Highly Commended

Synology

All Finalists

APCA 2024 systems — (Image credit: Future)

2023 was a massive year for laptop screens and processors, adding major benefits to appearance and performance across the board. Apple ditched the MacBook Pro 13-inch for the first time in a decade and released a new MacBook Air 15, we got a novel 18-inch gaming laptop category that really pushed the envelope of desktop replacement devices, and OLED came to budget-conscious laptops that cost as little as $1K.

We also experienced multiple releases of Apple silicon (M2 Ultra, M3 range), 12th and 13th Gen Intel CPUs, the first Intel ARC laptop GPUs, Nvidia’s 40 series graphics cards and AMD’s Ryzen 7000 and Radeon 6000 series processors all thrown into a season of diverse and advanced laptop launches.

The first foldable laptops emerged from Asus, HP and Lenovo, with some promising attributes offered by the new format, but probably not enough to see the category make a mainstream comeback just yet. The Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 is still the most versatile and useful 2-in-1 for creatives that need a stylus in our opinion.

20 hour battery life spans on Apple’s MacBook Pro and Air range are still probably the biggest standout feature of laptops in 2023, but both AMD and Intel have worked hard to reclaim performance leads from Apple processors in the laptop segment (even if they need more power to do so). Higher resolution, brighter and more colour accurate screens became standard on pro laptops across the board and GPU performance continued to be heavily influenced by the amount of cooling infrastructure included by laptop vendors.

Best Value Laptop or 2-in-1

Highly Commended

Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3

All Finalists

Best Premium Laptop or 2-in-1

Highly Commended

Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED

All Finalists

Best Gaming Laptop

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Desktop PC Maker

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA 2024 Components — (Image credit: Future)

This is the single biggest category of the Awards, and is arguably the most important. Whether upgrading a single part, or building from scratch, these are the things you will be thinking about most, and planning most carefully.

Over the course of 2023 we saw decent incremental evolution with many components and peripherals. DDR5 memory became commonplace, and speeds rose and timings fell. Juiced up CPUs and graphics cards demanded better cooling, and better case design, and the companies behind this gear delivered.

Monitors and networking, especially, saw big leaps as OLED hit its stride, and prices fell. Wi-Fi 7 entered the game, though Wi-Fi 6 still holds court for the time being.

2023 saw old players enter new arenas, familiar product lines were refined and evolved, and with the covid-induced pricing panic largely behind us, it’s a great time to upgrade with some nice new kit.

Best Memory Maker

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Cooling Product

Highly Commended

Corsair iCUE Link Ecosystem

All Finalists

Best Monitor

Highly Commended

MSI Optix G274QPF-QD

All Finalists

Best Keyboard

Highly Commended

Asus Rog Strix Scope II 96 Wireless

All Finalists

Best Mouse

All Finalists

Best Gaming Headset

Highly Commended

HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless

All Finalists

Best PC Case

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Router

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA 2024 Reseller — (Image credit: Future)

In 2023 resellers were doing their utmost to provide value-for-money offerings in their pre-built system lineups. With inflation hitting hard and graphics card prices still sky-high we saw resellers doing anything and everything to supply systems that provided value for money while still offering decent performance.

This usually manifested in resellers offering systems with previous generation parts in the pursuit of lowering costs. This often meant 12th or even 10th-generation Intel CPUs were used and AM4 socket parts for AMD systems. SSD capacities would often get reduced and be supplemented with larger, cheaper, hard drives. Lower-end motherboard chipsets were also often favoured.

It wasn’t all like that, if you had the money you certainly could have the latest and greatest of everything, so long as you were happy to tip your wallet out. Given the environment the retailers are working in they adapted well to offer the best value for customers.

This year we’d expect to see this trend continue. And although prices for most PC parts have come off the boil since the pandemic, GPUs remain stubbornly expensive. We hope to see change on that front but at this moment there’s no sign of relief yet.

Best Reseller

Highly Commended

Other Finalists

APCA 2024 Excellence — (Image credit: Future)

Excellence Award

For the person, product or technology that advanced the PC more than any other in 2023.

ChatGPT

2023 was indisputably the year of AI. From the gob-smacking first impressions that stunned the world as we toyed with the human-like answers to the most penetrating and absurd questions we could pose, to the speed at which it crafted its information, and the joyous thrill of having it create art that could be both beautiful and wonderfully ridiculous – it seemed like magic.

Then, as the real-world benefits became apparent, it was clear this was a world-changing tech and one that was, incredibly, still in its infancy. As programmers discovered how well it could compile code, as writers found an assistant that was astonishingly usable, as students had a homework and research partner that helped them understand a topic, but also write about it with intelligence and accuracy, reality set in. Nothing would ever be the same again.

ChapGPT is without doubt the poster child for the AI revolution. Now it’s on your Windows 11 desktop as Microsoft Copilot, and will be pervasive in many unexpected ways as it evolves. It hasn’t all been sunshine and roses – with fundamental change comes a very definite human impact. Jobs will change, and be lost, the economies of many businesses will be upturned, and calls for regulation and sensible use grow louder.

Still, there is no contest. Nothing else came close in 2023 – being the year that AI arrived and shook the world to its foundations.

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Gold Award

The company that impressed us the most, overall, in 2023.

MSI

Over the last few years MSI has had a laser-like focus on expanding its product range, and delivering quality and innovation that shows it’s clearly going for market domination. It has entered new areas, like storage, monitors, and now, networking, and done so with conviction.

We can easily see that the company is not just testing the waters – and that’s what impresses us most of all. MSI typically arrives in a new segment with an extremely high quality product to launch with, then doubles down to expand the range, and with generally no duds. Each new product is genuinely innovative in some way, and the company has resisted the temptation to flood the market with dull me-too clones.

Each new product and segment launch has been impressive. The Spatium SSD range now has over a dozen models. Its monitors are especially interesting and always score highly in our reviews. 2023 saw its first router released, and it came so very close to winning Best Router in these awards.

MSI hasn’t been relaxing, it keeps pushing hard and we’re now at the point where any new MSI product release is one we sit up and take notice of. It’s gone from being a company that would release dozens of motherboards in a single year each with only minor differences, to one where the range is tighter, and the innovation, features and quality have markedly improved. MSI is simply the most exciting company today that delivers across the entire PC components, peripherals and accessories space.

All Finalists

Epic Fail

2023's biggest loser.

Elon Musk and Twitter/X

Twitter / X was once the world’s most important source of breaking news and discussion. It was a playground for silliness and fun, too. It was a place where you could stay on top of your favourite celebrity, sportsperson or musician’s latest thoughts. It was also addictive knowing that most of your friends and colleagues would see your own post as soon as it was made, and immediately following that, the engagement as a new conversation was started. It even allowed you to participate in debates, often with famous and important people.

It is no longer any of those things. And, that’s a crying shame considering how rapid its downfall has been. Engagement has fallen through the floor, thus removing any personal or commercial incentive to post. Bots run amok, and you can no longer trust what you read. Moderation has become virtually non-existent, and the site is now heavily polluted with hate speech, with extreme political and social viewpoints being boosted into visibility that’s impossible to ignore.

And, it’s all seemingly by design. The great tragedy is that one man, Elon Musk, has the power to cook up a version of global discussion that suits his own agenda and ever-surprising beliefs, and depressingly, for his own notoriety and ego, too. Sadly, he is wielding that power. Almost every day we see his posts unavoidably pinned to the top of the feed, endorsing hate speech, ridiculing those who dare criticise him, and empowering an undeniably one-sided viewpoint. Musk is now, at best, petty and vindictive, at worst – a barrier to free speech, fair elections and open discussion of critical issues.

Witness the explosive growth of Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads when it launched. Twitter has been abandoned by huge numbers, and many flocked to Threads hoping for a new platform – which is why Threads appears in our Excellence finalists. Alas Zuck’s app was launched half baked – which is why it also is a finalist for Epic Fail. Still, the message is clear. Twitter is over.

Musk has used Twitter for election interference, for example shutting down access during the Turkish elections. He has mass-banned impartial journalists, he has rigged the rankings and algorithms to promote hate and violence, or to boost his businesses, and those of his investors. He is encouraging division and fuelling antagonistic conversation. He is not a ‘free-speech’ absolutist’, he is a hate-monger, and it’s a horrible loss to the world that we no longer have a vibrant, engaging and flourishing platform for thoughts and discussion.

Highly Commended

All Finalists