Cooler Xtreme : Coolers
: Casing : Lian Li PC-60 Aluminium ATX Computer Case
Lian Li PC-60 Aluminium ATX Computer
Case
Cooling
Stacked computers need airflow.
Most of them don't get much of it, but they still need it.
The Lian Li comes standard with
three extra fan locations - two in the front, one in the back. All three
extra fan locations have an 80mm 12 volt fan pre-mounted, and the intake
fans on the front have a washable dust filter.
The front fans lurk behind a
nattily perforated grille, which lets them breathe passably well.
The rear fan is a three-wire,
speed-reporting type, which you can plug into pretty much all recent motherboards
- they usually have at least two three-pin fan connectors, one for the CPU
cooler fan and one for a case fan.
If you don't have a three-wire
connector free, it's easy to adapt a three-wire fan to run from an ordinary
power connector - the motherboard just can't keep an eye on the fan speed
then.
The front two fans are also
three-wire types, but they run from a plain Molex-plug passthrough lead,
so the third wire's not used. The reason for this is partly because many
motherboards don't have connectors for more than two fans, and partly because
the case uses a little bit of custom hardware to let you change the speed
of the front fans. Of which more in a moment.
The front panel is retained,
very sensibly, by four simple plastic clips. A lot of cases have clips and
hard-to-reach screws as well; this one doesn't. And yet the front panel
does not rattle. Screwed-on front panels are retained that way because they
don't fit very well. The PC-60 does not have that problem.
Remove the panel, and you get
access to the middle 3.5 inch drive cage.
This cage is held in place by
another three thumbscrews. The panel hole is just wide enough for you to
get the cage back in once you've put a drive or three in it. It jammed the
first time I tried to replace it, because I'd forgotten to tighten down
my floppy drive retaining screws!
And the front panel blanks,
which you remove if you're mounting a floppy or Zip or other 3.5 inch removable
drive, aren't the usual pop-out plastic jobbies. These are de rigeur in
other cases, and are generally backed by a stamped metal plate that's held
in place by shreds of metal deliberately missed by the stamping die.
These plates need to be wiggled
endlessly to and fro, or smashed out of the case with a big screwdriver.
Which job is, in my experience, sometimes impossible without making a number
of observations about the parentage of said bit of metal.
The Lian Li 3.5 and 5.25 inch
blanks are classy bent aluminium plate units, to match the rest of the case,
and are retained with standard floppy/CD-ROM drive mounting screws. Nice.
This little switch lets you
set the speed of the front two fans, so you don't need to have them howling
if there's nothing in the bay in front of them.
The fan speed control employs
time-honoured Couple Of Big Resistors technology. At minimum speed, the
fans get about 7.5 volts, for about 40% of full power. Mid speed's about
9.8V, for two-thirds power, and full speed is the 12V you'd expect - probably
a little more, from most power supplies, when they're not fully loaded.
Running the fans slowly reduces
the noise they produce greatly, and should also extend their bearing life.
They don't have a proud "Ball Bearing" note on their sticker, so they're
probably bog standard sleeve bearing units.
These are usually theoretically
good for a life of 30,000 to 60,000 hours (three and a half to seven years
of continuous use) at full speed, but, in my experience, are quite prone
to dropping dead rather earlier. Run 'em slow and they'll fail later, and
make less of a racket when they do.
This is a significant issue
for corporate operators with floors full of computers. Cooling fan bearing
failures on multi-fan cases like this aren't likely to do any harm to anything,
but a buzzing $5 fan bearing will cause a support callout every time.
The speed control switch is
just above the fan filter. The filter's made of standard coarse-cell foam,
which won't impede airflow much but which catches dust quite well. It's
easy to remove the filter for cleaning.
The plastic pieces at the top
and bottom of the front panel look like carbon fibre. They're not. It's
just a printed and clear-coated finish, so I'm afraid you don't actually
get the superior structural strength of this advanced composite material
in these critical not-load-bearing-at-all areas.
The finish is very good, though.
I think carbon fibre as decoration is a bit silly, but at least this really
does look like carbon fibre, and not some dorky sticker on the side of a
low-riding Suzuki Swift GTi.
