The Australian PC Awards results are in—here are the winning components, laptops, peripherals and more

MSI
MSI impressed in 2024 with excellent innovation in both the high end and affordable range, as well as a big range of well-priced motherboards that will appeal to all buyers. Even the MSI Z890 boards had features and specs that far outshone the mediocre Intel Arrow Lake CPUs they catered for.

MSI Project Zero B650M
Early in 2024 MSI showed off Project Zero – a motherboard with all the connectors on the rear, giving an incredibly sleek, simplified build. It wasn’t just a concept, and MSI released some excellent, affordable boards (including the MSI Project Zero B650M) that became a must-have for unique PC builds.

Asus ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi
Sure, this is a motherboard that will set you back over AU$1,000 in Australia, but if you want the best of the best, it’s impossible to beat. Designed to push AMD Ryzen 900 series CPUs to their full potential, the Asus ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi was a key component in hardcore gaming builds during 2024.

Sapphire
Very much an AMD stalwart, Sapphire impresses us continually with its partner card designs. While most companies are firmly focussed on unremarkable Nvidia-based cards, it seems like every time Sapphire releases a new AMD card there’s something special about it. The Sapphire Nitro+ RX 7900 GRE is a classic example, and it quickly became an in-demand card for gamers looking for a quality alternative to Nvidia’s often expensive GPUs.

MSI RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X
Nvidia gave us this fantastic GPU in 2024, finally delivering 16GB of VRAM on a 70 class GPU while offering 10% more grunt over the non-Super version with a driver stack that is unrivalled, ultimately handing the great value and well engineered MSI RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X variant the win.

AMD Ryzen 8700G
When it comes to value, getting a CPU that can tango with a Ryzen 7 7700 while also offering double-digit iGPU uplifts over previous generation APUs by finally ditching the Vega architecture in favour of newer RNDA3, makes the AMD Ryzen 8700G a compelling all-in-one value proposition.

AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
The 9700X is the CPU choice for those that like to work and play without emptying their wallet. While not the best at any one particular thing, it does everything well enough while remaining cool and relatively affordable to be our mid-range CPU of choice for anyone.

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
The undisputed winner this year is AMD’s flagship gaming focused CPU. Not only does it offer over 20% more gaming performance than Intel’s latest, but it did so by solving X3D’s weakness—causing decreased clock speeds – by flipping the vCache chip onto the rear. A technological masterpiece.

Samsung
Samsung continues to deliver reliable and well performing SSDs, while keeping its range of drives to a sensible set of products that clearly define what the consumer should expect. For example, the PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro is our current choice for the best SSD overall, and the best SSD for gaming. This drive is rated for 7,450 / 6,900 Mbps of sequential read/write throughput and 1.2 / 1.55 million read/write IOPS. That means less time waiting for game levels to load or videos to transcode, not to mention a snappier experience in Windows.

Kingston
Kingston is number one in market share for DRAM, and the company leverages that to vertically integrate powerfully, offering a big range with frequent new product releases. Anyone searching for a new external drive will be immediately faced with a huge selection from Kingston. There’s something here to cover every need and budget, and the company has an outstanding history of reliability, which is the key thing we look for in this category.

Asus Vivobook S 15 Copilot
Not only was the Asus Vivobook S 15 one of the first Snapdragon-equipped laptops available, it's one of the most fully featured. Even better, later variants with the Snapdragon X Plus CPU retain the gorgeous 3K OLED screen, but are surprisingly affordable.

Apple MacBook Pro M4
With the new M4 CPU, a minimum spec of 16GB RAM, the ability to run two external monitors, and more frequent discounting from retailers, the cheapest MacBook Pro is surprisingly good value, though RAM, CPU or storage upgrade skyrocket the price.

Lenovo Legion 5i
Without major hardware updates to deal with going from Gen 8 to 9, the Lenovo boffins focused on improving the build quality, cooling and power handling. The result is one of the best mid-range gaming laptops available, and at a great price when on sale.

PLE
Innovation is one of the hardest things to achieve, especially when everyone has the same parts as you, making it all the tougher. PLE impressed us in 2024 with pre-built systems that did or tried things that no one else did, securing them this award.

TeamGroup
Of the memory kits we tested through the year, TeamGroup products consistently impressed. Always hitting the sweet spot with speeds and timing, TeamGroup kits are well priced, readily available and, we think, look the goods, too.

Corsair A115 Air Cooler
Corsair is a name that needs no introduction here. The A115 dual tower air cooler is the company's latest high-end air-cooling effort. With its top-shelf fans, stealthy RGB-less good looks, and some thoughtful features, the A115 sets itself up to contend with the very best air coolers you can buy.

Asus ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDP
Why has it taken so long for this to appear? Asus has finally produced a matte-screen OLED monitor that offers all of the colours and contrast of OLED without those annoying reflections. It’s great for office work and immersive gaming and its 480Hz Full HD mode owns at FPS shooters.

Ducky Zero 6108
Keyboards are getting more and more expensive—looking at you, ROG Azoth Extreme. That's why we love this keyboard from Ducky; it's surprisingly affordable. The Ducky Zero 6108 gives us everything we're after and all for under AU$150, an easy pick as the best mid-range gaming keyboard. Ducky is well known in the keyboard world for producing sensible, reliable and sturdy products. The Zero 6108 might be the best modern example of that design mentality.

Logitech Pro X Superlight 2 DEX
A testament by Logitech to competitive gamers, the Superlight 2 Dex adds another attractive form factor to the brand’s big range of gamer-oriented mice. The Logitech Pro X Superlight 2 Dex is an excellent mouse in a market filled to the brim with fantastic alternatives. If you've had your eyes on the Superlight 2 but don't like the shape, this will do everything you want out of it, and it will do it quickly and smoothly.

Asus ROG Delta II
A brilliant wireless all-rounder that remembers a gaming headset needs to look like a gaming headset. If you're looking for a basically indestructible gaming headset with brilliant sound and gamer flair, it's a standout choice. These things boom, but not at the expense of important environmental detail. We also found them to be great for music, despite not being expressly designed for that purpose.

Thermaltake Tower 600
The Thermaltake Tower 600 is a unique case with ample room for cooling and customisation. It has brilliant compatibility with modern components and is built to be built upon. It doesn’t feel like Thermaltake skimped on anywhere with this design, but that’s part of why it’s so pricey.

TP-Link Wi-Fi 7 Mesh System BE85
TP-Link’s BE85 Wi-Fi 7 mesh system offers extraordinary performance that, unlike other mesh systems, doesn’t fall off a cliff the further away you get. It even facilitates multiple concurrent streams of 4K video to be edited at once. It’s feature-packed and intuitive.

Visual Generative AI
2024 was a remarkable year for advancements in AI, particularly in visual generative AI, which can transform text into images and videos. In 2023, AI-generated videos were often amusingly bad or downright unsettling, with limited practical applications beyond niche use cases. Image generation showed more promise but was still plagued by well-known issues, such as the now-infamous inability to draw fingers. As 2024 unfolded, however, the latest image generation models became impressively accurate, with tools like Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill becoming genuinely useful for day-to-day tasks.

Then towards the end of 2024, a new wave of generative video AI emerged. These models seemed to leapfrog straight over the uncanny valley, producing photorealistic video clips of complex subjects and environments. Some, like Pika 2, even introduced the ability to incorporate specific object models into videos, enabling the creation of cohesive video series that retain key elements across clips.

Although there's still room for growth—such as generating longer video clips—visual generative AI has proven to be an amazing technology, and has achieved remarkable progress over 2024.

AMD
AMD absolutely crushed it in 2024 and has very much earned our Gold Award. This recognition isn’t for any one product, but it's hard not to love the mighty Ryzen 7 9800X3D, plus the Zen 5 microarchitecture itself. Not to mention, the RX 9070 and 9070 XT are impressive graphics powerhouses at affordable prices.

Naturally, a lot of AMD’s 2024 success has been years in the making, like the early, innovative switch to chiplet architecture back in 2019. While Intel dragged its proverbial feet, AMD was ahead of the curve—a move that earned Team Red the 2024 IEEE Corporate Innovation Award.

AMD didn’t forget about mobile computing either, and the Ryzen AI 300 Series and Radeon iGPUs launched in 2024 are in some of our favourite laptops.

2024 also saw AMD dominate in the data centre market and turn a profit, while Intel… well, didn’t. It was a busy year, as AMD helped build El Capitan, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, and made some big-money moves with ZT Systems and Silo AI acquisitions.

Of course, let’s be real here – a huge part of this success is thanks to Lisa Su. We aren’t the only ones who think so and Time Magazine named her 2024 CEO of the Year, and for good reason. For the last decade, she’s been making bold, strategic moves, like doubling down on CPUs and GPUs, locking in major gaming console deals with Sony and Microsoft, and focusing on building customer relationships.

Long story short? AMD has gone from underdog to industry leader and is more than deserving of our Gold Award.

CrowdStrike fail
Could it have gone to anything else? CrowdStrike’s stuff-up in 2024 grounded planes, crippled businesses and caused a panic that underscored the flawed nature of kernel-level security updates on Windows machines.

To sum up what happened, a routine update pushed by CrowdStrike caused an out-of-bounds memory read glitch, effectively leading to the blue screen of death experienced by millions of users around the world. It was basically a logic error and just a mistake.

In many cases, the bug could only be resolved manually and in-person, leading to IT workers needing to go computer-by-computer to restart the systems. It’s expected to have cost businesses around the world billions of dollars and it may have been the largest IT outage in history.

Though Microsoft projected that less than one percent of the entire Windows install base were subject to the outage, it still affected about 8.5 million computers worldwide, almost entirely at the business and enterprise level.

We also considered the messy launch of Apple Intelligence and the instability and failure of 13th and 14 generation Intel CPUs for the top fail of 2024 spot, but CrowdStrike just had to take the crown for its monumental impact on business.