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Lian Li PC-6089A


Date
: 11/1/02 – 12:51:30 PM

Author
:

Category
: Cases

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer: Lian Li
Price: $200

Introduction

Over the past few years, I have reviewed a lot of cases for Overclockers Online. Among that truckload of cases, many were made by Lian Li, a pioneer in building high quality aluminum computer housings. As our reviews have showed, Lian Li offers a very wide selection of cases: full towers, baby towers, server cases, desktops, small LAN cases, … you name it, they got it. Add to that a wide choice of colors and you are bound to find just what you need in the Lian Li product catalogue. A few weeks back, another Lian Li case was delivered at my doorstep, and as soon as I had it unpacked, I knew Lian Li had another award winning case in their gamma! This new case not only features a preinstalled window, it also comes with a sweet acrylic door and lights! This would make an ideal case for my next project: building an O² LAN box (since I attend LAN parties every once in a while). Let's get started …

Page 2 : Specifications

Specifications

The aluminum case I'm checking out this time, is called the PC-6089A. Note that Lian Li also carries a PC-6087A which is identical to this one, but it has a green finishing instead of a blue one.

- PC-6089A
- Dimensions: W210xH450xD490mm
- Weight: +- 5.5kg
- Drive space: total of 12 device bays
- External bays: 4×5.25" bays, 3×3.5" bays
- Internal bays: 5×3.5" bays
- Cooling: 4x80mm fan (2 in the front, 1 in the back and 1 in the top)
- Supports all ATX motherboards
- Two frontal USB ports (USB2.0 compatible
- Comes with a preinstalled window (can be "closed")
- Features two blue light strips in front
- Comes with a acrylic door to hide away the external bays
- Thumb screws

The PC6089A is a mid-tower, although some full towers will have a hard time keeping up with it, since it offers quite a lot of "room". The case measures W210xH450xD490mm, making it a pretty "normal sized" case if you ask me. I already mentioned that the PC-6089A offers a lot of expansion room: it features a total of 12 expansion bays (internal and external). On the outside you have access to a total of four 5.25" bays (i.e. to house cd-rom drives) and three 3.5" bays (i.e. to install a floppy or zip drive). Besides those seven bays, the case hides another five internal 3.5" bays to install your hard drives.

A case stacked to the top with heat emitting hardware needs good cooling. Lian Li takes care of it by preinstalling not one, not two, not three but four 80mm fans. Two of them are sitting in the bottom front of the case and are fitted with a 3-step baybus, letting you control the fans' speed. These two fans push air through the hdd-rack, making sure those puppies stay nice and cool, while also inserting cool air into the case.
The remaining two fans are located at the back and the top of the case. One draws heat away from the CPU, the other one works like a chimney, removing the rising hot air out of the case. Now, rest assured, this case does not sounds like a jet engine … Lian Li tends to use very silent Adda fans which do not generate a drastic amount of decibels :). To be honest, I couldn't even tell the difference between the lowest and the highest speed setting on the two frontal fans, as I had to put my hand in front of the fans to "feel" the difference in speed! Note that all fans are equipped with fan grills in order to prevent wires from being slashed.

Also on the front bezel, you'll see two external USB ports, both USB2.0 compatible of course. These will sure come in handy at the LAN's I'll attend, since I use a USB keyboard and mouse (finally, no more struggling through that wire mess behind my case ;)).

Another nice addition, is the blue acrylic door Lian Li added to this case. This "door" sits in front of all the drive bays and hides them from the eye … sort of, since it's transparent. The part where the 5.25" bays are located is blurry, probably to hide the mismatching colors of the cd-rom (beige doesn't look good with aluminum), and it actually works! Since the 3.5" section is not blurry, Lian Li provides a set of floppy covers to make your floppy drive look like aluminum: just peel of the paper and stick it on your floppy drive and all is well!! Way to go Lian Li!
Last but not least, Lian Li added two blue "light strips" to the case: one on each side of the 5.25" section. These strips turn blue as soon as you power up your rig, and let me reassure you, they look awesome!!

Now that I covered the front of the PC-6089A, let's have a look at the side shall we? Lian Li has preinstalled a window on this case, showing your rig's guts to anyone who wants to take a look. Very cool indeed, since it saves me a few $$$ to get a window kit and also some precious time to cut and install the kit. The window they used features blue dots on the sides, making it look kinda funky ;). Just in case you don't want to display your rig's inside, you can install an aluminum plate on the inside that fits perfectly inside the window. I prefer the window, as the pics clearly show :).

Apart from all that, you also get a good manual, a bag filled with screws and some plastic ties to clean up the wire mess :). Note that you are not getting a PSU with this case! Lian Li has decided to let the end-user decide what PSU he wants, and I do prefer it this way.

Page 3 : Installation

Installation

Installing your hardware into the PC-6089A is a piece of cake? First of all, you can easily remove the motherboard tray by removing four thumb screws. Once that's done, install the push-through thingies on which you'll mount the motherboard. Motherboard installed? Great! Now it's time to install the CPU, the memory and of course the add-on cards you might have. Once all of the above is completed, the only thing left to do is hook up the LED's and buttons to the motherboard. This job can be a real pain in the butt, but not with Lian Li! They include a unhookable set of cables making it easy to install all those connections with the motherboard tray out of the case! Once you slide it back in, just hook it back up and you're set :).

Here's a list of the components I installed:

- ABIT AT7 MAX Motherboard
- AMD Athlon XP 2100+ CPU
- 768MB Crucial PC2100 DDR Memory
- AOpen GeForce4 Ti4200 Video Card
- AOpen 32x/12x/48x CD-ReWriter
- Western Digital 20GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
- Western Digital 45GB 7200RPM Hard Drive

All the other stuff was onboard (damn I love these MAX boards – here is the review of the AT7) so I didn't need anything else cluttering the inside of the case. The only thing I added was a blue cold cathode light and a UV cold cathode light, both kindly supplied by Coolerguys, to make the case look even better. In order to chill the CPU (which would get hot during our LAN parties), I installed a Thermalright SLK-800 (here is the O² review) fitted with a transparent fan featuring four ultra bright LED's (props to Coolerguys for those). This combo not only performs excellent, it looks very sweet as well!!

All done, time to power up the beast and enjoy the light show! Note that the power button is excellent, but the reset button should be a little bit bigger as I had a hard time pushing it (not that I need resets that often … heck, my system runs rockstable ;)).

Page 4 : Conclusion

Conclusion

The Lian Li PC-6089A is a very slick case that will serve me well on upcoming LAN parties. Not only does it looks great thanks to the acrylic window, the blue light strips and of course the preinstalled window, it is very light to carry around thanks to the aluminum used to build it. The case offers a lot of expansion room as it offers a total of 12 expansion bays, to be used at your desire. Several cool features like thumb screws, a removable motherboard tray, a built-in baybus, 4 silent cooling fans, … and much more make it one of the best cases I ever owned! The only downside is the pretty steep price tag, keeping in mind that the case comes without a PSU. Nevertheless, I feel it deserves the
O² Power Award
!

Good

- Looks great
- All the features listed in the conclusion
- Light strips
- Preinstalled window

Bad

- Reset button too small
- Price tag