Cooler Xtreme : Coolers
: Casing : Lian Li PC-60 Aluminium ATX Computer Case
Lian Li PC-60 Aluminium ATX Computer
Case
Finishing up
A nip here, a tuck there, and
voila - a complete pig's breakfast.
The discerning hacker may elect
to attempt to corral his or her cables into something a bit more aesthetically
pleasing and a bit less airflow-impeding. Or he or she may decide, as I
tend to do, to stick with the au naturel fertiliser-bomb-in-a-wire-factory
look.
Routing the cables wasn't too
hard; I found it more annoying to plug all of this stuff in in my old tower
case. Drive bays are closer to the motherboard drive connectors in a smaller
case, and there's no cross-member with a small hole in it that you need
to pass loads of power connectors through in one direction, and loads of
drive cables through in the other.
Overall, and bearing in mind
that most buyers won't be cramming nine drives into it, I judge the PC-60
to be a big success. Everything moves smoothly, everything fits nicely.
If you're used to cases you
have to wiggle cards around in to make them fit, and that need a mallet
to get the side panels off, and that have mis-tapped screw holes in which
screws stick tightly enough that the Queen's First Gurkha Impact Wrench
Regiment is called for, the PC-60 is something of a revelation. This thing
costs a lot of money for a reason.
Ugly the above component collection
may look, but I'll have you know it booted perfectly, first time. I hadn't
swapped any drives around and thus ended up with switched drive letters;
I hadn't forgotten to plug in the power to anything; I hadn't swapped cards
to new slots on the motherboard and given Windows a nasty attack of hardware
redetection. I hadn't even plugged the case LED connectors in backwards.
So there.
After replacing the side panels
(and I didn't even have to sit on the computer like an overfilled suitcase
while I fastened them), the machine looks fine.
Beige drives on a silver front
panel may horrify certain aesthetes out there; they're welcome to paint
the drive bezels, or just build no-floppy, no-CD machines for their austere
Bauhaus office. Set the front fans to minimum speed and the background Albinoni
will remain perfectly audible.
Overall
It's unfair to call this the
Rolls-Royce of cases. It's more like the upmarket Honda. But since most
people are making do with the 1974 Toyota Corona of cases, the step up is
likely to be rather dramatic.
$USD263-odd for a case with
a power supply is a lot to spend, but it's not that much, compared with
the $USD157-odd price of a current model high-spec PC.
The Lian Li doesn't do anything,
practically speaking, that a big casters-on-the-bottom server case won't.
But you can't use giant server cases for home and office PCs. Well, you
can, but it's like commuting to work in a dump truck.
The Lian Li gives you big ugly
case features in a small elegant case. It's light, it's strong, it's very
well made.
