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While the usual focus when talking about a computer is what's under the hood, be it the latest processor or chipset or the fastest graphics card, a lot of focus has shifted recently to the hoods themselves, your computer chassis or case.
The enthusiast these days, more often than not, isn't entirely happy with packing a lot of power into their boxes, the box itself must also look good or perform a specific function.
Cases like the small Shuttle systems are popular these days (and I'm even using one to compose this article) and I personally know friends of mine that have made the switch, often accompanied by a downgrade in PC performance due to form factor restrictions, to a small form factor (SFF) setup like the Shuttle.
So while I'm a fan of SFF cases and systems, I'm also a fan of traditional cases and chassis from the mid tower, right to the extreme end of the scale with the case I'm reviewing today.
When it became apparent that this particular case would become available, the PC system I was building for myself at the time was a perfect fit so I had to snap it up. I was putting together a powerful workstation system, big CPU performance, lots of memory, powerful graphics card and a disk subsystem to match.
Now while any regular sized ATX case will take any ATX motherboard, memory and graphics card, depending on your physical disk space requirements you might find yourself needing something a bit different from the norm in terms of case and space to hold your disks.
For me, this is where the Lian Li PC78 was such a good fit. My disk subsystem was to consist of 3 hard disks, one as the boot drive and 2 data drives. Each drive was 10,000rpm or faster (the X15 boot drive is 15,000rpm) U160 SCSI and I needed a pair of optical drives, DVD and CDRW. The drives themselves with their rotational speed give off a lot of heat and in particular the pair of data drives, 73GB Seagate Cheetah's, got very hot indeed when worked hard.
Added to the fact that the data disks are double height and you can see why the average case might have struggled to fit the needs of what I was building.
So up stepped the Lian Li PC78, a definite server style chassis with excellent drive capacity, good cooling for the disk hardware and plenty of room for working in and cooling the rest of the system. This is no PC60!
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