Labnotes - June 2025

The Big One

What the heck are we doing?

Alrighty, the first-ever lab note post for PC Blueprints. Wow, what a challenge this has been. I'll be honest, setting this up all from scratch has been one hell of a ride. There's so much that goes into building out a tech brand, or even just a basic site like this. I mean, to be clear, right now, the team consists of me, and that's it. I keep talking to people about it as a group, as an entity: "We're going to do this," "We're going to cover X, Y, and Z and write it like this." In reality, it's kinda superfluous at the moment, given you know, I'm the sole occupier of this space (for the time being), but it's just such an ingrained habit it's hard to break away from it.

I've learned a ton building this out too, creating the site, figuring out the CMS (we're using Ghost here, which is a premium sort of micro-blogging platform first and foremost; I'll be doing a few articles on this in the coming months), and then developing content plans, long-term strategy, and social media; covering off the legal grounds; and then, of course, figuring out how to grow it too, effectively on only my own investment. It's been quite the learning curve.

For me, it's got that kinda tinkerer vibe, the same feeling you get from setting up your perfect OS install or selecting the hardware for your next rig or overclocking a CPU. I can't quite place it, but it's that, that with a bit more excitement around it. At least for me, anyway.

When Maximum PC was initially closed down, it came as one hell of a shock, that's for sure. There were some rumblings, some rumors, but from my point of view, it was all very quiet, business as usual, until a week before the next PC build shoot at least, and then bam! I get a phone call from the boss. We chatted for hours and hours on how to save the brand and see if it was possible to resurrect it on a limited budget, but to no avail. For the time being, it's on ice. Publishing costs are too high, and the URLs and investment required to get it up to par with Future's other dominant online offerings are just too high, especially right now, given the state of things with SEO and AI (it's a whole thing).

Still, I owed my career to that magazine. It was always there for me through thick and thin. As a reader, as a staff writer, as its editor, and as a freelancer, I owe so much to it. It had such a history too. In 1998, the first issue launched; although it was an internal number, we finished on issue 241! Crazy. There were so many talented individuals that worked across it too, so many editors, journalists, and techies; thousands of articles, features, reviews, columns, careers all sparked off the titular title.

It's a real shame it didn't get a proper send-off, but for those reading, I do want to just say thank you, certainly from myself and the wider team. Your support, particularly during my time there, was always welcome, and it meant the world to us. We battled through covid, Christian going off to fight (and defeat cancer), budget cuts, page-count reductions, and more, and made it through the other side, all thanks to the support of the subscribers, and it's something I'll be forever grateful for. In a world of chaos, Maximum PC was my sea of calm.

And yet, I'm not done, because, to be blunt, I miss the old girl. The blueprints, the builds, the columns, the podcasts—so I'm firing up the old cogs in my noggin and getting to work building this little beauty out. But here, things are going to be a bit different.

I want PC Blueprints to be unique, different from what's out there currently. I don't want it to be this giant juggernaut of a thing, brimming with ads, cookies, tracking, and affiliate links, filled with millions of nameless faces, or a community that doesn't know each other. I want it to be more than that. I miss Maximum PC's forums and the back-and-forth we had in the mag with letters and doctor. It made it special, you know?

So yeah, my plan is to slowly grow this out. Build it into something magnificent, with features and deep dives, builds and tutorials, reviews and columns. I want to bring back monthly podcasts and develop a team of permanent staff and freelancers, and I want to do that without the trappings of modern-day tech journalism. No ads, no affiliates, none of it. Just cold, hard, honest journalism, supported by all of us.

It's bold, I'll admit, and I'm nervous, but I believe in it. I think we can do it, so if you're up for joining me along for the ride, through the trials and tribulations (and probable chaos that's inevitably going to unfold), I'd be more than happy to welcome you to the fold. 

We've got options for free members, subscribers, a Discord channel, and more, and if you're up for supporting me and this mad endeavor to build a site in the midst of an already stupidly well-established tech arena, well, all I'll say is thank you. I best get to work!

Editor's Pick

2TB WD Black SN8100 M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSD

I'm going to keep this month's editor's pick short and sweet. I recently got to grips reviewing the WD Black SN8100 for PC Gamer, and my days, is it good. This is by far the best SSD I've tested to date. For pure throughput and performance, it's second to none.

It's utilizing a Silicon Motion SMI2508 8-channel controller mixed with some of SanDisk's 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND, and dear lord, does this thing rip and roar at a staggering rate of knots. It's not cacheless, no, but the single-sided stick's performance is otherworldly. 

Sequentials basically max out the bandwidth on PCIe 5.0, topping out at around 14.7 GB/s and 13.9 GB/s in my testing, and it's got some of the absolute best random 4K read performance I've seen on any drive in the last five years, and not by any small amount either, but by 30-40 MB/s on top. It's nuts. That, of course, translates to game load times too, and sequential copy and pasting as well. It's wild.

It's not absolutely flawless; it's fairly toasty at 75°C under load, and well, it's not the cheapest SSD on the block, but for the price, if you're after the best drive, right now this is it, without question. If I'm honest, I'm convinced it's getting quicker too.

Oh, as a side note, you may recall that Western Digital and SanDisk merged a while back? Yeah, broken apart again. The PRs got in touch when I initially published the article, giving me the lowdown on that one. Who knew, huh? Looks like we might be getting some dedicated SanDisk SSDs again in the long run, or they'll just stick to a B2B format. Who knows…