When it comes to computing products aimed at enthusiasts, companies will bend over backwards to come up with an innovative feature, or be the first to add a particular ability to a component that was only found in . . . say . . . the enterprise market. They do this for sales, and name recognition. Of the many facets of the enthusiast computer market, it can hardest to maintain this cycle in the enclosure market. You can only do so much with a simple box, meant to house the actual operating guts of a PC. That’s where a company like Lian Li comes in. They’re known for producing quality cases, with new and interesting features that are often imitated by other companies en masse. Today, we’ve gotten a hold of their PC-A7010 Full ATX Tower Case for a test.
Features and Specifications
The PC-A7010 is a full tower case that for all intents and purposes looks like any other high end aluminum case on the outside. With its clean, almost monolithic appearance the case looks like the kind of quality case you’d expect from Lian Li. It also has a whole host of features that you would expect from a high end enthusiast case, both on the inside and the outside. But there’s one interesting feature that sets this case apart, and it’s outlined in the table below.
Did you catch it? The PC-A7010 has a seven drive SATA RAID rack, with a full backplane. This brings the ability to hot swap hard drives easily to the desktop environment. The case also features a whole lot of space inside, and is able to fully accommodate an E-ATX mobo and extremely long graphics cards. I think I’m getting ahead of myself though. You can check out the product home page for more details on the features, or you can keep reading.
As for pricing, the Lian Li PC-A7010 full tower case can found at many online retailers for between $300 and $330 USD. This definitely puts it in the price range for high end cases, which actually has a surprising large amount of choices already. It also places it right next to well known enthusiast cases like the Silverstone Temjin TJ10. This leaves one wondering how well it stacks up to such cases. We’ll find out in the next few pages, starting with taking a look at the exterior and then working our way inside.
Visual Inspection
The front exterior of the PC-A7010 has a rather typical collection of external 5 1/4″ drive bays; five to be exact. The lower fifth drive bay can be converted to a 3 1/2″ bay should you need to install a memory card reader, or are still tied to the so-obsolete-it-won’t-die 3 1/2″ floppy drive. Tape drive and ZIP drive users are not excluded. The entire bezel is aluminium and snaps off with a simple pull, much like the drive covers themselves. As for activity lights, there’s only a single blue power light and a single red IDE light. Below the drive bays resides the power and reset button, and some ventilation for the front fans.
These details look pretty pedestrian from the outside though, but once the bezel is pulled off things start to look much more interesting. The power and reset buttons, for one, are not the normal spring loaded momentary switches. Rather they are much higher end (in terms of electrical components) microswitches, like those behind the buttons on a car stereo. Next to the power and reset button resides something much more interesting: A slider switch with three separate settings. This switch controls one or all of the fans inside the case (there’s enough power connectors for all the fans within), and the settings are for low, medium, and high. It would be nice if this switch was accessible directly from the bezel in some fashion, but the bezel has a good set of friction spring clips that make it easy to remove.
The two fans at the front, which are controlled by the afore mentioned switch, are the only intake fans on this case. This makes them quite easy to filter, and there are two anti-dust filters adorning the front under the bezel to facilitate this. They are easy to remove, easy to clean, and do a decent job keeping dust bunnies from cultivating in your PC.
Moving back to the top of the case, we get to see another intelligent design choice by Lian Li. Most people keep their computers on the floor. Odds of this chosen placement go up when the computer is housed in a case as huge as the PC-A7010. It is with that in mind that Lian Li decided to install the external ports on the top of the case. There are connections for eSATA, Firewire, USB, and front panel audio. Thankfully the cables behind these ports were made extra long, and should reach all four corners of any motherboard.
Knocking on the Backdoor
The rear of the Lian Li PC-A7010 is about as feature laden as the backside of any other high end case. It’s at least as well ventilated, with there being a vent along side the PCI slots, venting at the top of the case (complete with fan and hard drive rack), and even vented card slot covers. There are two locations to install a power supply, which only requires removal of the secondary hard drive rack. This case even supports water cooling.
Above the rear 120mm fan, there’s two grommet holes to run tubing for water cooling through. Unfortunately, like many other cases that have this feature, the holes aren’t big enough to fit the 3/4″ OD (1/2″ ID) tubing that many enthusiasts are now using in their rigs. They will easily accommodate the tubing found in most all in one kits, but if you’re building your own water cooling setup with this case you’ll have to pick appropriate tubing, or start cutting. This of course voids your warranty, not that it has stopped anyone before.
Heading Inside…
The interior of the Lian Li PC-A7010 is extremely roomy and spacious. Like many other full tower cases, this one should be a breeze to work with inside. The motherboard tray supports every ATX form factor up to E-ATX. It’s also removable, though it doesn’t slide out. Rather it tilts out from the right side of the case. The lower power supply mount is designed with foam rubber standoffs and a vent, with the idea to support a bottom mounted fan. There’s also a support strut running the height of the case, which with some included accessories is used to support large expansion cards so they don’t bend or flex.
Should you have really large expansion cards, like those in the full PCI range, there’s support slots for each of the seven ports. This is one of the features that makes the PC-A7010 a good contender for cheap server case. The other big feature is the front hard drive rack, which actually has a SATA backplane that supports up to 7 SATA hard drives as we mentioned earlier.
This feature makes it easy for you to swap out hard drives without having to fuss with cables. It also makes it easy to hot swap drives should one crash and need to be replaced. The rack is almost toolless, except for the tools required to change the hard drive out of the mounting handle. If you have any type of RAID array, this is a much sought after feature. You just have to make sure your hard drives of choice conform to the standard for placement of the SATA and power connectors.
Room For Everyone…
If you happen to own a hard drive that doesn’t conform to those standards, there is an additional hard drive rack at the top of the case. It’ll support up to three drives, and features it’s own cooling fan blowing out the back. Though the rack lacks the convenience of a backplane, it does offer tool-free installation. With some special screws installed, you can easily slide your hard drive of choice in and out. This means it’s now time to touch on the included accessories.
Included Accessories
Lian Li of course included a huge collection of bits and doo-dads with the Lian Li PC-A7010 full tower case. Since this case has so much going on, it needs a lot of parts to get things…going. There is a whole host of screws, including normal screws for mounting hardware, screws and washers for mounting hard drives, extra thumbscrews, and a spare small screw driver to help with some of the finer tasks. Not pictured is the included PCI card holders, a second power supply bracket, and a backplate to support SSI CEB and SSI EEB motherboards. Also not pictured is the paperwork, which includes a concise multilanguage manual, as well as separate catalogues for other cases and accessories in the Lian Li line-up.
Since the goal of the aforementioned hard drive rack is to allow quick and easy swapping of your hard drives, Lian Li has included these simple bolt on handles. The screws used fit into the mounting rails of the rack, and the handle makes it remarkably easy to remove the drive from the rack. Since it’s supposed to be so easy to install a system into this case, I guess we better do just that.
The Hardware List
Well now it’s time to so how much of a high end case the Lian Li PC-A7010 full tower is. To test the case, we installed the following test system into it consisting of the following components:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz Quad Core CPU
- GIGABYTE GA-EP45-DS5 Energy Saver Motherboard
- Corsair Dominator DDR2 4GB PC2-8500 RAM Kit
- ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition Video Card
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 10000rpm SATA2 Hard Drive
- Western Digital Caviar SE16 640GB 7200rpm SATA2 Hard Drive
- Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W Power Supply
- Sunbeamtech Core-Contact Freezer CPU Cooler
These components were selected to test every feature and aspect of this case. Testing will consist of running the pertinent components at maximum, and testing the thermal and acoustic properties of the case to see how it stacks up to its contemporaries. That, however, is getting ahead of ourselves. For now I’d like to highlight some of the issues that came up in installation.
Setup and Installation
And when I say issues, I’m really only talking about two big ones. The first is related to the way the motherboard tray is designed. To install a motherboard, CPU, and cooler, you have to tilt the tray out from top to bottom. When trying to reinsert the tray, any large cooler seems to block the tray from being reinserted. This would be a big deal, if it wasn’t for the fact that most of these coolers require removal of the motherboard to be installed. This pretty well eliminates the point of the motherboard tray all together, if you are using a large tall cooler. Luckily the interior of the case is very roomy, and easy to work in. This would be nigh unforgivable on a smaller enclosure.
Also once the large cooler was installed, its size combined with the size of our test video card prevented the reinstallation of the bar that goes from top to bottom and is used to support large expansion cards.
Still all is not doom and gloom. I really prefer a removable motherboard tray, that maybe opens like a door or slides back on rails. While the motherboard tray is fairly annoying, the size of the case mitigates that problem. It also makes for easy cable management. There’s so much space that anyone with an ounce of patience can perform some wonderful cable management. My picture isn’t exactly a great example, but I did say you had to have some patience.
When it comes to cable management, I was also concerned with the height of the secondary hard drive bay. The SATA backplane was extremely easy to use and without issue, but I was worried about cable length with this secondary rack. Thankfully I didn’t have to worry much, as the standard SATA cable I was using to hook up the VelociRaptor reached all the way to its SATA port without issue. Overall, installation in this case was a breeze even with the noted issues.
Once everything was assembled, it was time to plug it all in, press the power button, and pray everything still worked. Before each test, idle conditions were established by letting the PC run for 30 minutes without any activity. This gave the temperatures and noise levels a chance to stabilize, and Windows Vista a chance to calm the heck down and start idling.
Temperature Check
The first set of tests we ran through were the thermal tests. This is to test how well the PC-A7010 handled our test rig under both idle and load conditions. Load was generated using the program OCCT, which places 100% load on both CPU and RAM, and records temperatures while doing so.
Now since it’s the middle of winter where I live, and the temperature outside is a frosty -17°C outside, my computer room is sitting at 20°C no matter how many systems I have running. That would undoubtedly affect the results of our thermal tests, but this is almost funny. Whether it was under idle or load, there was only 1°C of difference between each fan speed selection. Actually if you compare these results to the other cases I’ve reviewed, and take into account the ambient temperature of the room, the Lian Li PC-A7010 still comes out ahead. The number of fans, and their size, definitely contribute to the overall performance of this case. Hopefully they don’t detract from the Zen like quietness of my office . . . when my computers are shut off.
Noise Levels
When it came to noise testing, we used a fairly simple method to get results. Noise testing was performed using a dB Meter pointed at the case from the same relative position where I’d be sitting. The room was brought to a silence, and the dB Meter was given a minute to stabilize. This was then repeated for each fan speed selection.
- Low Speed: 43.1 dBA
- Medium Speed: 45.2 dBA
- High Speed: 47.1 dBA
Even with it’s large amount of fans, the Lian Li PC-A7010 doesn’t sound much louder then any of it’s competitors. Though the medium speed setting seems to be the sweet spot, I barely heard anything that I would categorize as annoying in any of the speed settings. The fan controller, though simple looking, also managed to handle the six 120mm fans plugged into it without frying itself. So with all that figured, I think it’s time to wrap this up.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
Lian Li is indeed known for high quality cases that have the features and specifications enthusiasts and power users seek. The PC-A7010 does continue on that path. This case is well built, and well thought out overall. The exterior looks great with its all metal finish. The placement of the LEDs and the external ports suits a wide range of users. There’s even plenty of expansion room for more components down the road.
The interior tells the same story, with a host of features many will take a liking to. The case is almost cavernous with the amount of room given to work with. The SATA backplane is a nice touch, and it’s very nice to see such a convenient feature trickle down from the enterprise market. Overall, the case was easy to work with when installing a system, and didn’t drive me mental with fan noise when in operation.
Still there a couple minor issues, and one decently sized one. The minor issue is the placement of the fan switch. Though I’m sure Lian Li was worried about ruining the aesthetics of the case, it would have been nice to be able to switch fan speeds without having to pull off the front bezel. Though on the bright side, people do tend to set and forget. As for cooling the internal components, the way the mobo tray comes out needs to be re-assessed. The way it is setup right now does make it difficult to install some larger coolers that are popular these days. This is something that you’re going to want to take note of so you can take advantage of all that airflow.
In the end, we have another great enclosure from the folks at Lian Li. The price may be a little steep, but you get what you pay for. With the added features like the SATA backplane, the six quiet but cool fans, and the incredibly roomy layout, this case will likely find itself to be the home of my new main desktop rig. I’m sure it will do just as well as your own.
Pros
- Lot’s of room
- Hot swappable SATA backplane
- Wide array of motherboard support
- Very well constructed
Cons
- Large coolers don’t mix with the removable mobo tray
- Need to remove the bezel to change fan speeds
- Might be a little pricey for some
Overall Rating: 9.0/10.0
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