Product Reviews

With its monolithic black looks and four silver castors, Lian-Li's new case looks similar to Zalman's silent TNN 500A-HS1. It's not in the same league build-wise though: the PC-V1100B tips the scales at a substantial 7.5kg, but this pales against the Zalman's 25kg. It doesn't sport the TNN 500A-HS1's silent heatpipe system either; despite being billed as a silent case, the Lian-Li should really be called quiet.

Its design shows some superb attention to detail - as you'd expect at this price - but also curious failings. The sides are lined with acoustic absorption foam and the interfaces between the doors and the panels are lined with very neat seals too, catching as much sound as possible. There's even a noise-reduction baffle on the rear case fan. A captive screw holds each side panel in place: a few turns release a sliding catch mechanism and you can pull the panels off with very little fuss. But the motherboard

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tray isn't removable, making installation of the board and its components much harder than if it was hinged or at least detachable.

Then there's the arrangement of the insides, which runs contrary to conventional ideas of layout and cooling. The power supply - not supplied - is mounted at the bottom rear of the case in a separate compartment, meaning its fan can't aid in cooling the processor. Hard disks are mounted in their own long tunnel-like compartment at the bottom too, serviced by a front-mounted 120mm fan. This leaves optical drives and the motherboard in the top. Lian-Li calls these three areas 'thermal zones', and illustrates the concept with vague notions of better airflow by overlaying arrows on a diagram of the case. We have reservations about the whole idea - in particular, the inward airflow from the front case fan is cut off from the rear one, reducing the efficiency of both fans.

Suffice to say that we found the concept less than effective. For testing we built the PC-V1100B into a complete system with a hot-running 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560 processor plus an nVidia GeForce PCX 5750 graphics card. We left it churning through 3DMark03 overnight, and returned to find that the machine had overheated and hung.

It's a shame, because with its great looks and nice finishing we wanted to like this case. The V series also comes in a G5 Mac lookalike design, with a perforated front panel that may increase airflow. But the V1100B is one to avoid if you need effective cooling.