Friday, March 14, 2025

2025 Australian PC Awards winners – all the gear experts reckon is better than the rest

2025-australian-pc-awards-winners-–-all-the-gear-experts-reckon-is-better-than-the-rest
2025 Australian PC Awards winners – all the gear experts reckon is better than the rest
Australian PC Awards 2025
(Image credit: Future)

Keeping pace with the tech and trends of the PC world is our job. We do it because we love this stuff, and because we love sharing what we learn with you. So, the joy of gathering with our colleagues, locked away in a room with ‘do not disturb’ taped to the door for two days to discuss the year that’s been and pick what shone the brightest is pretty much the highlight of our tech year.

Team TechRadar gathered up our friends from APC, PC Gamer and PC PowerPlay for this task, as we always do. We discussed every bit of tech and gear we’d seen in 2024, not always agreeing at first, but well-reasoned debate led us to being quite sure that the winners here really are deserving.

Across 25 categories covering everything important inside a PC, and what connects to it, we came up with 173 finalists and, from that, 25 winners. Here they are, the cream of the crop for the year, the best we reckon there is. Maybe you already own something we liked here, and perhaps you’re looking for something new – either way we hope this list is inspirational and useful.

Congratulations to all the humans behind the scenes at all the companies covered here. You’re doing a great job – keep it up!

Australian PC Awards 2025

(Image credit: Future)

What are the Australian PC Awards?

Our awards cover all the main categories that affect a 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 2024.

Gold Award: For the best overall company operating in the PC space for 2024. 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 2025

APCA 2023 MOBO

The year in review: Motherboards

After a big 2023, motherboard manufacturers spent 2024 expanding their offerings for AMD Zen 5 and Intel’s 14th-gen CPUs. On 24 October, the much-anticipated Intel Arrow Lake (Core Ultra Series 2) launched, along with an all-new chipset and socket. While the Intel CPUs themselves were a disappointment, the Z890 chipset introduced a few exciting upgrades, like increased RAM speed and extra PCIe 5.0 lanes.

The advantages of upgrading to a new motherboard were somewhat tempered by the new LGA 1851 socket and the lack of a promise that it would remain compatible with future CPUs. On the plus side, most existing LGA 1700 coolers still fit. Despite this, motherboard manufacturers stepped up, with a range of excellent Z890 boards available at launch – even if not many people wanted to upgrade.

We also saw many manufacturers launch truly ultra-high-end models, as well as some interesting innovations, like back-connected motherboards. Even the affordable boards received extra attention, with plenty of budget models offering specs that compete well in the lower mid-range.

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

The year in review: GPUs­؜

2024 was a very quiet year, with the two main players not launching a new graphics architecture we’re doomed to refreshes and minor updates. And that’s what we got from Nvidia in the form of the RTX 4000 Super series refresh. The 4080 Super didn’t really improve performance but did at least help pricing for the then very overpriced part it superseded. With the 4070 / Ti Supers barely nudging the bar higher, it made the refresh feel a little ho-hum.

AMD didn’t do much better with just the RX 7600 XT and RX 7900 GRE launching. The GRE at least made customers think with its reasonably compelling price-to-performance ratio.

Instead, it was Intel that breathed fresh air into the ecosystem at the end of the year with the launch of its Battlemage architecture in the Arc B580. Offering solid 1440p performance and superb pricing it was quickly heralded as the entry level GPU saviour we’ve been waiting for. Though its driver overhead flaws and lack of availability soon marred its reputation and ultimately made our choice for winner more difficult than it otherwise would have.

Best Graphics Card Maker

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Graphics Card

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA 2023 CPU

The year in review: CPUs

It was a busy year for new CPUs. We had a very hyped-up launch for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite which came out swinging offering unprecedented levels of battery life, but ultimately, driver support and incompatibilities soon wore away all the good press they recieved. AMD had a big fizzle of a moment with its Ryzen 9000 series desktop chips that for the average Joe didn’t offer much more than the 7000 series. Not to be outdone in the disappointment department, Intel launched its Core Ultra 200 series, one of the few where there’s been performance regressions compared to previous offerings!

Intel did better with its Arrow Lake laptop series launch offering good performance, better iGPU uplifts and great battery life, though AMD’s new APU’s tended to impress a tad more overall.

Apple, of course, continued to iterate with the new M4 series though it seems like Apple’s developers are running out of steam compared to everyone else.

The gains over previous generations this year seemed very small and rather disappointing on the whole, with huge battery life and power usage improvements seeming to be the main name of the game this year.

Best value CPU

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Mid-range CPU

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Premium CPU

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA storage

The year in review: Storage

Keeping your data safe while being able to access it quickly is the beat that drums steadily onwards. Despite having been available for a couple of years now, the quick new PCIe 5.0 standard still lags behind PCIe 4.0 in popularity. The newer gen 5 drives are still expensive by comparison, heat remains an issue – leading to often impractically large heat sinks or even active cooling – and for most people PCIe 4 is plenty fast enough. Helping keep gen 4 SSDs price-competitive is the ever-growing market for PlayStation 5 user-upgraded SSDs.

Hard drives still exist, which is about all we can say about them. In mid-2024 Seagate debuted a 24TB drive, which is intended for enterprise and NAS use. Speaking of NAS – for the second year running these awards don’t include a NAS category. Once upon a time we would see several new consumer NAS products each year, but the scene is desolate now, which we interpret as earlier NAS models able to do the home job perfectly adequately, and a shift in focus to enterprise for the big players like Synology and QNAP.

Best Internal Storage Maker

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best External Storage Maker

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA 2025 systems

The year in review: Systems

After a slow start, 2024 turned out to be an exciting year for laptops, with a range of new CPUs and product redesigns that felt genuinely fresh and innovative. The Snapdragon X Elite impressed with its performance but struggled to sell, while the latest Ryzen 9 AI chips were delightfully powerful but tended to run hot in slim laptops. In a happy surprise, Intel’s Lunar Lake mobile CPUs found their way into some of our favourite laptops of the year.

We saw delightful 120Hz OLED displays on even very affordable machines, USB4 and Thunderbolt are standard fare, but upgradeable RAM is increasingly rare. Perhaps feeling the pressure, Apple finally bid farewell to 8GB of RAM, making 16GB the default for MacBooks – and, perhaps most surprisingly, they didn’t raise prices. Meanwhile, Microsoft built some great laptops and 2-in-1s, but its heavy-handed push for Copilot+ was painful to watch.

Gaming laptops saw few hardware changes over 2024, featuring the same GPUs and slightly upgraded CPUs, but impressed thanks to improved displays, refined cooling systems and great value from the mid-range 4060 models. On the desktop front, systems faced challenges from fluctuating GPU prices, and many owners of 13th- and 14th-gen Intel CPUs found themselves regretting not opting for AMD. Mini desktop PCs gained popularity, largely thanks to AMD’s CPUs – and even Apple joined the fun with the M4-equipped Mac Mini.

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 & Reseller

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA 2023 Components

The year in review: Components and Peripherals

This is by far the biggest category in these Awards, and understandably so. Through the year we saw a resurgence in the popularity of CPU air coolers, driven by several new coolers that come extremely close to liquid AIO coolers at a fraction of the price – and are much less of a fiddle to install.

Monitors continue to be a hotbed of innovation, with QD OLED leading the way. Choice in screen size and aspect ratio continues to expand. Ultrawide gaming screens fill the market now, with 49in screens appearing from most manufacturers.

Keyboards continue to offer more, for more money, with super-premium models now regularly exceeding AU$500, and DIY kit boards also gaining ground.

Case trends are firmly moving towards the ‘aquarium’ style, which uses a glass front panel, a design popularised by Hyte and picked up on by just about every other case maker. Wood is also the new cool look, and we’re good with that.

Wi-Fi 7 continues to pick up steam, though pricing is still keeping routers out of reach for many homes. Motherboard support for Wi-Fi 7 is now common, so we hope that will help the drive towards more Wi-Fi routers at lower prices.

Best Memory Maker

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Cooling Product

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Monitor

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Keyboard

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Mouse

All Finalists

Best Gaming Headset

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best PC Case

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Best Router

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA 2025 Excellence

Excellence Award

For the person, product or technology that advanced the PC more than any other, in 2024.

Highly Commended

All Finalists

APCA 2023 Gold

Gold Award

The company that impressed us the most, overall, in 2024.

All Finalists

apca epic fail award

Epic Fail Award

The biggest loser of 2024.

Highly Commended

All Finalists

Last year’s winners

See who won last year right here!

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