The time has come for the big reveal – as we announce 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 PC PowerPlay, with help from our colleagues at APC, TechRadar and PC Gamer.
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 commendeds and finalists. If it’s on a list here, it’s good gear!
What are the Australian PC Awards?
Our awards cover all the main categories that affect the PC, encompassing products that went onsale in Australia during 2023, 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!
MOTHERBOARDS
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
