Cooler Xtreme : Coolers
: Casing : Lian Li PC-60 Aluminium ATX Computer Case
Lian Li PC-60 Aluminium ATX Computer
Case
Sticker shock
OK, so it's pretty, and has
a heap of features. But it ain't cheap.
A normal midi-tower case will
only set you back about $RM260 for a nice one with 1mm steel and rolled
edges so it doesn't slice you to ribbons when you're working on it. And
that includes a 250 watt power supply, which is a $RM120 item all by itself.
The PC-60's $RM814. And that's
without a power supply.
The black version of this case,
the PC-12, sells for only $RM650. So you'd think it'd be a better buy, wouldn't
you? After all, black goes with everything.
But the black Lian Li case has
the problem of all black cases. Black may look great, but black interrupted
with beige looks lousy, and pretty much all off-the-shelf floppy and CD-ROM
and other removable drives have beige front panels.
It's not exactly rocket science
to get the front bezel off pretty much any drive and paint it black, but
you've got to start asking yourself whether you might perhaps need to go
to some kind of support group for your computer aesthetics problem.
The silver Lian Li case, on
the other hand, doesn't look too awful with beige bezels showing on the
front panel. And heck, you can paint 'em silver, if you want.
Trying it out
Appearances aside, any old case
will do if you just need a basic computer without unusual numbers of drives,
super-hot components or other oddities. The PSUs that come with dirt cheap
cases are sometimes dodgy, but they often work fine for years. And who cares
if the case is made out of crummy thin steel with sharp edges and not one
right angle in the whole thing, if you're never going to have to work on
it?
The Lian Li case is not targeting
this anything'll-do market segment. It's so expensive because it's meant
to be, as Lian Li say among the other not especially amusing Chinglish statements
on the side of the PC-60 box, "Design for high performance PC system".
All righty then; I've got one
of those. Let's see if it fits, shall we?
My primary motivation in repotting
the contents of my current number 1 PC into the Lian Li case was, of course,
so that I could have a computer that looked approximately as cool as Shaft.
My secondary motivation was
to see whether the small-ish but multi-bayed PC-60 could actually deal with
having most of those bays filled without turning into a nightmare to work
on.
Lots of consumer tower cases
have bays like Imelda Marcos had shoes, but force you to run cables through
holes in stiffening cross-members, make you jam drive-backs into common
IDE connector locations, and contain interdimensional vortices which consume
screws that fell off the driver while you were quivering your way to fixing
the awkward side of that fourth hard drive.
In various ways, they are far
from optimal if you actually want to use all of the space available.
The PC I transferred into the
Lian Li is, in essence, the Sunshine Home for Lost Drives. It's got five
hard drives, an IDE CD-ROM, an IDE DVD-ROM, and a SCSI CD writer.
It's also got lots of cards,
a toasty warm overclocked Athlon CPU, and I'm not certain whether my partridge
and pear tree are in there too, but I know I can't find them anywhere else.
Decanting a computer
The PC-60 comes with the usual
little bag of screws and other hardware, which is stuck to the side of the
bottom drive cage with, so far as I can determine, E-Z-Shred, Nev-R-Budge
brand Annoying Tape, specially formulated to waste five minutes of the day
of a person attempting to make the case pretty for photographic purposes.
Ahem.
Step one was to give the PC-60
a PSU. I could have just transplanted the 300 watt supply I was already
using, but I decided to take a step up, and chose a Topower 350 watt supply.
The 350 has more grunt than the 300W PSUs that most people use for stacked
machines, but not as much as the hard-to-find 400W supplies.
A decent 300W supply's really
perfectly adequate for almost any ordinary PC, no matter how many drives
you've crammed into it; 350W just gives you some extra headroom. This PSU
costs less than $RM200.
The only downside of the Topower
PSU is that it's only got four four-pin Molex power connectors coming out
of it, and a pair of the smaller floppy drive connectors.
This is a bit weird, as higher-power
PSUs are likely to be used by people with more than four-drives-plus-a-floppy-or-two
to power. But no matter. The soldering-impaired can easily buy Molex Y-adaptors
for a few bucks each from electronics stores, and them as know the hot end
of an iron isn't the part you hold can trivially make a Molex Christmas
tree with as many connectors as is necessary.
Installing the PSU in the PC-60
is dead easy. You don't have to push it up against the back of the case
from the inside, because there's a special mounting plate that screws to
the PSU...
...then lets you insert the
PSU assembly from the outside of the case, and secure it with thumbscrews:
