(Image credit: Future)

We don't give a score of 90% or more to just any old thing—we're real hardware sickos with standards to match. And, as real hardware sickos, many a shiny bobbin has received a thorough humbling at our hands. Yes, we love RGB lighting as much as the next person, but it'll take far more than a sparkly light show to impress us.

All of that said, a whopping 34 bits of kit earned a review score of either 90% or higher—that's 4 more than last year. But what was simply the best?

It's interesting to note that only one bit of hardware among the highest-rated six costs less than $100. Spoiler alert, it's the Arctic Freezer 36, going for a seriously impressive price tag that rests comfortably under $50. Still though, it's hard to ignore just how expensive PC gaming continues to be.

With the memory pricing apocalypse upon us, not to mention how it's set to carry on into 2026 and beyond, a bit of kit's value proposition is never far from our minds. That said, the WD Black SN8100 2 TB NVMe SSD is still sitting pretty among our top six hardware review scores.

There's a healthy mix of kit in our top six, but once again, no graphics cards feature among the heaviest hitters—if you've seen how much more than MSRP some GPUs have been going for throughout 2025, that probably comes as no surprise. However, the same cannot be said for the opposite end of the scoring spectrum.

Carrying on Nick's grinch-esque tradition from 2023, I'm also going to include six dishonorable mentions that were absolutely hardware misses. Almost nothing enjoyed the infamy of a score less than 40% this year, which I think generally speaks to the quality of kit that tends to pique the hardware team's interest. Still, that doesn't mean I'm going to go easy on 2025's four hardware flops. Anyway, before all of that, let's take a look at the six highest review scores we gave in 2025.