2023 Australian PC Awards winners: the best of the best in PC

(Image credit: Future)

Welcome to a particularly interesting edition of the Australian PC Awards. Unlike most years in tech which are clean, tidy periods where everything runs smoothly and we all buy loads of nice new things, 2022 turned that upside down with one drama after another, all in a market where actual products you could buy were scarce, expensive, or delayed.

This is not to say the actual products were duds – au contraire – the tail end of 2022 in particular saw a spectacular period of new GPUs and CPUs, along with exciting new motherboard platforms. DDR5 got its act together and became good while affordable laptops leapt into new realms of low power and high performance. We even saw some standout new techs that blew us away, like QD-OLED monitors.

The editorial teams at TechRadar, APC, PC Gamer and PC PowerPlay thoroughly enjoyed compiling these finalists, and then selecting the winners. It was a fascinating year with tech highs and lows. The highs certainly weren’t in short supply... it’s just that the lows exceeded the expected quota by an alarming amount.

But we've selected our winners and they are clear to us as the best of the best. Read on and see what got the big gongs. Maybe you agree, maybe you have differing opinions. In either case that’s all good; 2022 was a confusing year, but thanks to these 2023 Australian PC Awards the cream has been separated and all the good stuff properly rewarded.

Words by Ben Mansill, Joel Burgess and Chris Szewczyk.

The APCA 2023 sponsors — (Image credit: Future)

We were really spoiled for choice when it came to motherboards in 2022. Both AMD and Intel released new platforms meaning we had a huge variety of boards to choose from.

In September, AMD released its AM5 platform, which added support for DDR5 memory. High end X670E boards were joined by X670, B650E and B650 boards. Four chipsets? Actually, they all use the same chip. It's just that the X series uses two of them, while the B series uses one. AMD says it intends to support AM5 for several years to come. If it has a long life like AM4 did, then you can expect to be able to upgrade to a Zen 5 or Zen 6 processor with just a BIOS flash.

Just a month later, Intel released its 13th Generation CPU range accompanied by Z790 motherboards. Z790 is more or less an evolution over Z690 with a better I/O thanks to the inclusion of more PCIe 4.0 lanes. This means Z790 boards typically have improved support for high bandwidth devices and controllers, including things like more PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots or things like USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4 controllers.

Sadly, motherboards were not immune from the all too well-known effects of inflation and wider tech industry woes. That meant high quality motherboards were expensive. They still are. It wasn't long ago that an AU$500 motherboard was regarded as ultra-premium. Now, AU$500 is considered mid-range.

But if you are prepared to pay, at least you can expect a high-quality product. Things like the power delivery, cooling, USB port count and speeds and support for faster M.2 drives mean you'll have a motherboard that will happily power a system for many years to come, no matter what you use a PC for.

Best Motherboard Maker

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Value Motherboard

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Premium Motherboard

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA 2023 Graphics cards — (Image credit: Future)

When it comes to graphics cards, 2022 was very much a tale of two halves. The first part of the year was dominated by the influence of crypto mining, COVID fallout and ongoing geopolitical concerns. That meant GPU pricing was simply ridiculous.

Once Ethereum shifted away from GPU mining, things slowly returned to normal. Stocks consistently appeared on shelves, prices dropped and PC gaming came back from its perilous position.

With mining in the rear view mirror, the latter part of 2022 was genuinely exciting thanks to the release of Nvidia's RTX 40 series and later on, AMD's RX 7900 series. Intel's long gestating Arc cards also made their debut, though they didn't have the impact Intel would have hoped for.

The RTX 4090 was unveiled in September. It retained peak mining era pricing, but if you were prepared to pay, you were rewarded with the highest performing GPU ever made. The RTX 4080 followed, and though it's an excellent GPU, its popularity suffered as a result of its high price.

The end of the year saw the release of AMD's RX 7900 series. While the 7900 XTX couldn't knock the 4090 off of its perch, RX 7900s are still competitive options with both introducing chiplet technology to consumer GPUs for the first time.

If 2022 was the year of high prices and high end cards, 2023 is looking better, with both companies (and perhaps Intel too) set to release compelling mainstream options.

Best Graphics Card Maker

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Value Graphics Card

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Premium Graphics Card

Highly Commended

Sapphire Nitro+ RX 7900 XTX Vapor-X 24GB

All Finalists

2022 was a huge year for CPU releases. The start of the year was dominated by the release of Intel's mainstream 12th Generation range including the excellent Core i5 12400. AMD also fleshed out its Zen 3 range, with more affordable Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. All of these CPUs were welcome at a time when value for money was becoming a difficult thing to find.

One of the highlights of the year, if not the last decade, was the release of the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Its stacked cache is very much cutting-edge technology. This CPU with its 96MB of L3 cache offered gamers in particular a very compelling upgrade option. Chip stacking is a big part of AMD and Intel's future plans.

These were impressive and highly recommended CPUs, but the big headlines were reserved for the September launch of AMD's Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, and just a month later, Intel's 13th Generation CPUs.

Both can be considered an evolution over their predecessors, delivering generally better performance and/or power efficiency. Intel increased core counts across the range, negating the advantage AMD held for many years.

It wasn't all cheers and high fives though. Both companies generally increased their power consumption levels at each product tier which means there's a need for very good cooling to tame the faster chips from both AMD and Intel.

Best Value CPU

Highly Commended

AMD Ryzen 7 5700X

All Finalists

Best Mid-range CPU

Highly Commended

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D

All Finalists

Best Premium CPU

Highly Commended

Intel Core i9 13900K

All Finalists

If 2022 was a big year for PC component releases, the storage industry wasn't so exciting. That's not to say PC storage isn’t faster and more affordable at each capacity, it's just that there wasn't a product or release that didn’t feel like an evolution of something that came before. The best drives in 2022 weren't necessarily the fastest ones, but rather the ones that offered a good balance of speed, capacity and value for money.

PCIe 4.0 drives saturated the market and more or less hit their performance ceiling, at least in terms of sequential transfer speeds. With lots of competing brands, a high speed M.2 drive became more affordable than ever – a win for consumers.

PCIe 3.0 M.2 drives became relegated to budget status. As they approached price parity with SATA drives, they became very good options for things like bulk media storage or for storing space hogging game libraries.

Speaking of SATA, the humble hard drive isn’t going away any time soon. Large mechanical drives are still much cheaper per gigabyte than flash solutions and they remain highly relevant.

We expected PCIe 5.0 SSDs to launch in 2022, but sadly they were nowhere to be found.

Best Internal Storage Maker

Highly Commended

Samsung

All Finalists

Best External Storage Maker

Highly Commended

TeamGroup

All Finalists

APCA 2023 systems — (Image credit: Future)

2022 was the year of systems defying size expectations and breaking norms. Whether it was Apple releasing a MacBook Air that’s more expensive than a number of MacBook Pro devices, or Razer’s Blade 15 with a 3080 Ti that’s thinner and lighter than a LG Gram 16 2-in-1 and MacBook Pro 16, today’s engineering is shrinking powerful components into unbelievably compact packages.

The fourth generation of NVMe PCIe SSDs ushered in practical read speeds over 7,000MB/s and write speeds of more than 5,000MB/s. Rates that almost seem more like RAM transfer speeds than something that you’d use to retrieve Word and OS files.

We saw a handful of OLED screens on approachably priced Ultrabooks and many of the players at the top end are introducing novel features like integrated glass trackpads, displays on the outside of laptops, laptop screens that hinge like drawing tables, and others that have a whole second screen emerging from the keyboard.

We reviewed laptops you have to assemble yourself from the ground up, and others that you have to tear down to the most granular level to work out how they function.

Professional gamers can now expect their portable rig to offer 360Hz displays, while recreational gamers can indulge in HDR games at high refresh rates on 1440P or even 4K screens if they don’t mind paying for it.

GPUs were a bit of a minefield again this year, with TDP wattage and thermal dissipation capabilities impacting performance significantly more than the label on the tin. Even then wattage didn’t translate perfectly into performance either, so it’s more critical than ever to read a review of the laptop you want to buy to understand its performance.

Intel’s 12th Gen laptop processors shifted to a high core count dual-performance-and-efficiency core array structure that dramatically improved performance across the board, Apple tweaked its original processor with new memory bandwidth and AI capabilities in the M2 and Nvidia introduced Optimus to greatly improve the experience of trying to optimise battery life and performance on gaming laptops.

Best Value Laptop or 2-in-1

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Premium Laptop or 2-in-1

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Gaming Laptop

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Desktop PC Maker

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA 2023 Components — (Image credit: Future)

Through 2022 the transition from DDR4 to DDR5 as the new standard for most new motherboards took place, and initial scarcity and high pricing has given way to better value, lower timings and wide availability.

Air CPU coolers continue to hold strong in the face of the ongoing AIO assault, and our Labs were dominated by one company that we always thought of as just being all about value, but the quality was a very happy surprise and shows you don’t need to spend over $100 to cool a premium CPU.

Wi-Fi 6 routers really matured in 2022 and a few incredible models transformed the market. Top of the pile was Synology’s RT6600ax router. The normally NAS-known company pushed hard with its flagship Wi-Fi 6 router and we quickly saw why.

The big news in monitors is QD OLED. As distinct from the non-QD OLEDs that first appeared, adding the Quantum Dot layer defeated OLED’s big weakness, being a lack of brightness.

Keyboards, mice and headphones saw no huge evolutions in the last year, still, there are occasionally some interesting designs though style drives this segment more than others.

Best Memory Maker

Highly Commended

Team Group

All Finalists

Best Cooling Product

Highly Commended

DeepCool LS720 (360mm) AIO

All Finalists

Best Monitor

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Keyboard

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Mouse

Highly Commended

Razer DeathAdder V3 Pro

All Finalists

Best Gaming Headset

Highly Commended

JBL Quantum 610 Wireless headset

All Finalists

Best PC Case

Highly Commended

Nzxt H7 Flow

All Finalists

Best Router

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA 2023 Reseller — (Image credit: Future)

During the year of the Great Graphics Card Drought, Australian resellers did it tough. The struggle to get stock was one issue, while keeping customers with orders placed informed of an often heavily delayed delivery process was another thing they had to face – all while doing their best to get new customers in an era of stock scarcity and pricing inflation.

It wasn’t just graphics cards, but that situation typified the challenges resellers faced in 2022. And, we were so impressed with how most of them handled it. Communication and transparency was great to see, with many resellers having daily updated reports on stock and expected delays.

Through all of that they also had to keep at it with the regular business of building, selling and supporting new PCs and other gear. It was a tough year, but by and large they shone, and our hats off to the people at the front line doing their best to keep customers happy.

Best Reseller

Highly Commended

Other Finalists

APCA 2023 Excellence — (Image credit: Future)

Despite all the supply chain issues and economic chaos, tech companies were actually able to deliver a wide range of seriously-impressive and often novel technologies in 2022. The APCA Excellence award is for the person, product or technology that progressed the PC the most in 2022 and whether it’s AMD’s vertically stacked CPU V-Cache or RDNA 3 chiplet GPU architecture; Nvidia’s advances to powerful GPUs and next generation DLSS; or Apple’s continuation of it’s RISC processor range with the M1 Ultra, which outperformed all but one consumer CPU on the market at launch; there’s no doubting that 2022 was huge for PC developments.

There were even more developments in updated Wi-Fi 6E networking technologies, the living room PC got perhaps its biggest flood of novel large-format monitors, and new game streaming technologies all contributed to help people expand where and how they can use their computers. But while all these technologies were significant, there was one technology that made a bigger difference to the overall PC landscape than any other.

Excellence Award

For the person, product or technology that advanced the PC more than any other in 2022.

Intel’s 12th-Gen mobile CPUs
Intel’s 12th generation notebook processors adopted a dual-type core structure, consisting of single-threaded efficiency cores and hyper-threaded performance cores that dramatically increased the number of cores Intel used in notebook CPUs and facilitated between nine and 37 percent performance bumps on chips all the way up to the Intel Core i9-12900HK. This is a major shift from the 10 to 15 percent year-on-year performance jumps we are used to seeing and allowed Intel to convincingly outpace AMD’s offerings and compete, in many ways, with Apple’s processors.

Intel is still the backbone of the vast majority of laptops out there, and so the major leap forward in 12th Gen CPU performance and efficiency effectively raises the bar for all notebooks in the space from lightweight tablet 2-in-1s to premium gaming workstations.

Highly Commended

All Finalists

The challenges 2022 imposed on a company delivering good consumer tech in 2022 were big ones. On one hand, we had all the excitement of new-gen products being launched that will shape PC performance for the next couple of years, but on the other, supply chain disruptions affected factory output, and the cost of making stuff and getting it shipped around the world.

Meanwhile, these companies had to continue the pace of innovation and deliver value. All a tough situation, no doubt.

As we reviewed the potential winners and discussed what did well, it became crystal clear that there was one company that succeeded more than any other. It’s the same company that has won this award in the past, and it’s Asus.

Gold Award

The company that impressed us the most, overall, in 2022.

Asus
There’s simply no weak area in any segment of Asus’ wide range of products. It covers so many different areas and yet is able to deliver a big range of high quality gear giving consumers great choice, and a knowledge that whatever you buy from Asus will be well designed and made, usually with price-point options to meet every need and budget.

Asus scored more finalist nominations than any other company here, and by a long shot. That’s testament to the breadth and quality we’ve come to expect from Asus.

All Finalists

APCA 2023 Epic Fail — (Image credit: Future)

What a banner year 2022 was for things that flopped. It’s hard to recall a year richer in failure than 2022. So much so, that we have introduced the Epic Fail Award for the very first time. Our shortlist is a mind-boggling collection of promises made and not delivered upon. It includes terribly unfair things that happened to Australians. It is a finalist list that has comedy, and tragedy.

For some of these, we could all see the writing on the wall, and it was just a matter of time before the implosion. NFTs and the Metaverse count among those. In Australia we got two huge data hacks with Optus and Medibank, but we didn’t get the Steam Deck… we couldn’t get a graphics card without paying stupid money, and we briefly got an RTX 4080 12GB card before it was swiftly ‘unlaunched’ in a comically poor bit of marketing from Nvidia.

Taking the Highly Commended is Mr Elon Musk. 2022 was one cluster of muck after another for Musk. His badly botched Twitter takeover is the main reason he’s taking a prize today, but we can’t help stare in awe at how he also alienated his customer and fan base through the year by embracing internet trolldom and fuelling the fires of online idiocy, thus burning all the fame and goodwill he accumulated over the last decade in one spectacular fall from grace over just a few short months.

Epic Fail

2022's biggest loser.

NFTs
The gong for this year's Epic Fail award goes to NFTs. It’s rare that something so absurd has any degree of success, yet a great many people had faith that a picture that’s not actually a picture has value. Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton got sued for spruiking them and Donald Trump got in on the action with a shamelessly low effort set of NFTs. All the Gobblin Ass NFTs were stolen before they made it to market and the Bored Ape that Seth Green made a show about got pinched in a phishing attack that cost the spawn of Dr. Evil 165 Ether in ransom (about US$300K) to get back.

As the price of crypto followed the global stock markets into the toilet, so did the once-bright future for NFTs. Well done NFTs, thank you for the laughs, and we’re sorry if you lost money on these things.

Highly Commended

Elon Musk

All Finalists

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