Labnotes - August 2025

The Big One

Decisions on a shoestring

I gotta say, I knew setting up a site from scratch was going to be difficult, yet the most challenging aspects of it aren’t quite as obvious as you might think. Like getting the URL, setting up the theme, building out the media strategy, choosing a CMS—all that is super easy. Not a problem. But it’s the detail stuff that’s the real challenge. There’s so many small things you need that you don’t realize when you first decide to build your own publication. Like the list is endless.  

Today, for instance, I spent two hours pouring over my social media strategy. I need to keep it simple, easy to run, and well, affordable for the time being. Because it’s effectively just me. 

The first thing I needed to consider was what platforms to use. There’s the Discord channel setup first and foremost (a mission in and of itself, which I’ll go into detail about at some other point), but then what else? And what other sites do I need to reserve for if we expand in the future?

I’ve settled on the primary ones, at the moment being Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. At least to start with. The latter two kinda being doubly connected, as Pinterest will just pull the posts from Instagram anyway.

I’ve then settled on Buffer to effectively manage all of the post scheduling. It actually has a “free” plan that allows you to link up three separate “channels,” or social media accounts, without additional cost, and for the time being will be perfect just to get the site out there and started (and try and sneakily pop up in front of old Maximum PC readers). Eventually, if I need to expand into other socials, I can do it with Buffer as well, and there are some nice features on the premium versions that have caught my attention.

Pretty much every other social media management system out there, though, has a monthly cost and no free plan, which is fine; I understand. People need to pay wages after all, but once you start adding services on services, especially when you’re just starting out, the costs start to mount up rapidly, and I just need to be careful with that. Particularly as I do want to focus on quality content first and foremost.

And then there’s the web analytics side of things too. You’ve probably guessed it at this point, but I’m not the biggest fan of AI in its LLM form. It just isn’t the greatest for journalism, and as such the site’s not really built around Google and probably never will be (in fact, I’ve actively banned any and all AI scrapers I could via a robots.txt file, solely to attempt to try and protect the content).

For me PCB is not about SEO or AI overviews but more about just delivering top-quality content that answers the questions you have and building out the community in a natural, organic manner instead of trying to hit search terms. A bold strategy, I admit, and possibly foolish, but it’s what I want to do, so I’m going to do it.

Because of that, I kinda wanted something different than Google Analytics. I’ve never liked GA4; it’s clunky, intrusive, awkward, and far too complicated (it actually slows some sites down as well, which ironically isn’t great for SEO). Fathom looks the most promising at the minute. It’s a super compact, concise analytical tool that’s GDPR compliant and non-invasive, but annoyingly there’s no free plan, and it starts out at $15/month, and that price bumps up considerably once you start hitting more and more total pageviews. So for the minute, I’m going in blind! It’ll be fine.

Still, I cannot stress enough, this is awesome; the more I work on the project, the more I love it. It feels like PCB is growing into something really exciting, and I cannot wait to announce it properly and bring as many of the ol Maximum PC gang back together again.

Editor's Pick

Tryx Panorama SE ARGB 360 AIO Cooler

Don’t worry though, I haven’t been entirely fixated on just site work over the last month or so. I’ve also been toying around with some interesting coolers too. Mostly for PC Gamer.

The Tryx Panorama line has had me hooked. I reviewed the first one for PCG way back in May, I think it was, itself an early rendition that’s now since had its fans replaced with ARGB solutions. But what irritated me about it (other than the Asetek pump) was that it just missed the mark in a few key areas.

The main “gimmick,” or feature, is that it has a curved OLED display that wraps around the waterblock. It’s effectively a separate unit powered via a USB 2.0 header that sits magnetically attached to the top of the block, with contacts for the integrated pump cooling fan (also ridiculously annoying). It’s effectively very similar to some of the early Asus Ryujin III models we saw with the 8th gen Asetek line (one I famously broke in the Holiday 2024 issue of Maximum PC). Which is fine, but it meant that you could only mount the curved OLED display a particular way. With the tubing inlets and outlets at the bottom of the CPU socket, if you wanted the screen in the correct orientation for its stats, videos, and all that malarky.

Couple that with the fact that it only had 400mm long tubing runs anyway, and it made case compatibility a bit bleugh, to be honest.

The newest Tryx Panorama SE ARGB 360, though, has corrected a lot of those foibles for me. Now it’ll mount to the block in effectively three different orientations, and although you can’t wrap it around those tubing runs, you can rotate the core CPU Block/Asetek Adela pump in any manner you see fit. That gives you effectively 12 separate combinations and a hell of a lot more versatility than before.

On top of that, the tubing runs are now 450mm long, and more impressively, Tryx has dropped the price by around 17-22%, depending on if you’re in the US or the UK. That brings it way below that $300/£300 mark and makes it highly competitive with the likes of the absolute king of screen-based coolers, the NZXT Kraken Elite.

I’ve got a review going live with PC Gamer in the next few weeks, which I’ll link here as well once it’s up, but it gets top marks on my end. The thing’s a killer, and I’m starting to fall in love with it a little. 

It’s just nice to see a brand iterate so rapidly on a product design and not have a crazy insane ego, to the point that they can’t take critical feedback like that, y’know? I’m not the only person to have raised those concerns, of course, but nevertheless, it’s great to see.