Every week on the PC Pro podcast, one member of the team nominates their Hot Hardware of the Week. It’s not necessarily a brand spanking new item. It’s not necessarily hardware, as we choose software and services, too. But it is an interesting piece of tech that we think deserves wider attention.
In this feature, we’re rounding up our 2023 Hot Hardware highlights. We’ve got more than 20 nominations from this year’s podcasts, plus a selection of more festive stocking fillers, if you’re still on the lookout for a gift for the techie in your life.
Regular listeners to the podcast will know that not only do the other team members get to vote on whether an item is hot or not, but we let the listeners who join us live every week vote in an online poll, too. The vast majority of the items listed here were voted winners, but we’ve sneaked in a few that didn’t quite make the cut. What’s the point of running your own magazine if you’re going to let readers dictate everything?
On each of our mini-reviews, you’ll see who nominated the item, plus a reference to the podcast in question, in case you want to go back and listen to the full item with everyone’s opinions. Hot Hardware is the final item on every show, so scroll forward until you reach 10-15 minutes from the end to listen to that segment.
Regular listeners will know that editor Tim Danton has earned himself something of a reputation as a lemon-backer in the Hot Hardware stakes, but this reputation is somewhat unfair. At the time of writing, Tim has a 50% success rate in 2023, and in fact it’s Darien Graham-Smith with the worst hit-rate of all, with a lowly 33%. (To be fair, Darien has voted against his own nominations on two occasions!)
Barry Collins and Jon Honeyball both share a success rate of 63%, but it’s Lee Grant (who suspiciously provided these stats) who has a 100% win record in 2023. Podcast newcomer Rois Ni Thuama has yet to enter the lion’s den, for those keeping score.
If you want to make your feelings known on Hot Hardware, join us live for the PC Pro podcast at pcpro.link/discord every Thursday at 1pm UK time.
GEEKOM AS-6
Price: £699 from geekom.co.uk
Nominated by: Barry on podcast 647
The Geekom AS-6 offers an incredible amount of power for the price. A Ryzen 9 6900HX with integrated Radeon 680M graphics, 32GB of RAM and 1TB of hard disk are all packed into its tiny frame, yet it costs less than £700. You might think that’s decent enough for day-to-day duties, but it can handle gaming, too. Titles such as and are playable at high-quality settings even at 4K, although dropping down to Full HD delivers perfect smoothness. With
