Lian Li PC35
Lian Li... Well we have heard a lot about them in the last little while and they are now the main competitor to Coolermaster in the prestige case market. In the past year or so they have dominated the market with a mass of cases with sales to match. Most people have heard of these cases now and with good reason ;-) We reviewed the PC72 a while ago which amazed us with the quality of the case build. This time we are taking a look at a smaller case from Lian Li, which has been designed for the office.
Here is the PC35!
The case is aimed at the home user or the office worker. The cases themselves
are very attractive and they also realise that people do not need to hold 50
hard drives, and 10 CD ROMs; instead people need to hold enough for a basic
system - perhaps for the lounge - a DVD box or for a small box in a child’s
room. Enough to play on the net with or to watch DVDs.
- 2 x 3.5" bays Removable
- 1 x CD Rom bay
- 2 x Removable IDE Mobile rack
- 2 x USB ports
- 1 x 80mm Front firing fan
- Removable motherboard tray
- Internal Thumbscrewed System for cards
The case is anodized aluminium and it has thumbscrews all round making the case
is very light and easy to take apart. The PC35 uses the same normal mounting
holes on the main board - and also for mounting brackets - so there is no need
for a screw driver to mount anything on the main board. You only need one to
mount the hard drives and the main board to the unit. The motherboard tray
itself is removable and it is a lot easier to build a system this way - I
wouldn’t dream of building a system in a case which wasn’t with such easy
access.
The removable motherboard tray
Something which we haven’t seen on a case before is removable hard drive bays -
this system has 2 IDE bays - and thus are not hot swap but they do have a lock
on them and also power LEDs on each one and this does seem like a useful feature
to me. We can swap between systems with the hard drives in saver caddies. These
caddies are ATA 100 compliant, but you will get some slowdown across the units
due to the data which is stored on them - sizes of the files, and also with the
fact it "swaps" between interfaces.
On the front of the case there are 2 USB ports and as usual with aluminium cases
there is a Sunon 80mm fan located behind the front of the case. There is no
speed adjustment on this case which is in a way annoying as you would want the
system to be quiet, but doesn’t bother us that much. There is a rail which
mounts the floppy drive to the system - you can have 2 3 1/2" bay units
installed. As usual with Lian Li's you can pull the front off the case without
any tools.
Here is the front of the case "removed."
As this system is a smaller case you have to be careful about what you install,
an onboard motherboard is the best in this case, I decided to opt for a nforce
based board - the MSI board, this coupled with an XP2000 CPU would be the base
of the system. We put in some Crucial ram for a kicking system. There is a draw
back - where you mount the cards, they can hit the removable hard drive bays at
the back - this is why we haven’t got a Geforce 3 in this system. You also need
to be careful about memory. We could only put in 1 module.
This is the inside of the case
The routing of the cables around the case was easy - we found some shorter
cables and installed them as normal and finally slide in the motherboard.
As we were using this system in the lounge at my house, we decided that the best
bet was to use a quiet cooler - in comes a nice Coolermaster sink - no large
Swiftys or Alphas used here. This was good as the PSU mounted directly above the
cooler and they would have hit each other/
Here you can see the side mounting PSU.
This is where we get to the cool bit - you can mount your case standing up or
sideways - this really did help us at Hexus as we could have it mounted on a
Hi-Fi rack or even on the floor. We built the system as slickly as we could
hence why we went for the MSI nforce board.
Well this case - what do we think - it is lovely, my other 1/2 thinks it is one
of the nicest cases I have had around the house. It is a sweet little case. The
advantage of it being a Lian Li is the costing and they are cheaper than
Coolermaster which also means better value for us end users. This case I expect
to be around £100. It is in a class of its own, and this with a little bit of
kit makes an amazing system. The only thing to be careful of is the RAM slots
and the IDE areas.
This case wins the editors choice - it’s a slick little case which packs a punch
and looks very nice!
