Was 2023 a memorable year? Honestly, I don’t know how it just flashed by so quickly. I blinked, it was summer, then once more and I find myself collating the winners of the PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2023. But, while it wasn’t a year that saw major new architectural advances in either gaming processors or graphics cards—it was a year of refreshes in the main—there was still a huge amount of great PC gaming gear released over the past 12 months.
For me, it’s been a year that’s all about mobile hardware. For one thing, Nvidia’s RTX 40-series hitting gaming laptops lead to a whole slew of brilliant, powerful objects of notebook desire. For another, this was the year that handheld gaming PCs really came of age. Sure, the Steam Deck really pushed things forward in earnest last year, but the AMD APUs at the heart of this year’s devices have given us some incredible handheld gaming PCs.
And then the only real architectural advance of the year came in the form of Intel’s inaugural Intel 4-based chip, Meteor Lake, and that was late in December and purely focused on laptops.
While we might have been hoping, after the excesses of 2022’s graphics card pricing, that we’d get some more reasonable hardware this year. And while we most definitely have gotten cheaper GPUs than the RTX 4090, they’re still not delivering the price/performance uplift over the previous generation we were hoping for. Still, AMD has delivered in both processor and graphics terms, giving us the outstanding Ryzen 7 7800X3D and the Radeon RX 7800 XT. Seriously, an AMD 7800-series PC is going to deliver and do it for a pretty reasonable price, too.
There have also been great monitors—including the best OLED so far—and a host of excellent chairs, keyboards, mice, and more this year. But if there was anything else that made 2023 in terms of PC tech it was that big SSDs are finally affordable, so it’s no surprise to see a 4TB drive representing. So, now you’ve seen the 2023 nominations, here are the winners of the PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2023.