Lian Li's PC-90: The Hammer Strikes Hard
by Dustin Sklavos on February 21, 2012 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- mid-tower
- Lian Li
Assembling the Lian Li PC-90
I have to be honest, what Lian Li packages with the PC-90 is pretty daunting, and I think a lot of it really could've been excised without harming the overall package. There is such a thing as too much, and the PC-90 finds it. Lian Li includes a plastic case for holding screws, a nice touch, but also includes several confusing plastic pieces that you'll find are supposed to be snapped into the middle plate to help brace expansion cards. These are liable to be used for bracing extra-long workstation cards, but it still feels excessive and worse, needlessly confusing.
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Thankfully, if you can parse out what Lian Li includes, assembly of the PC-90 is actually fairly simple and logical. The motherboard tray comes with standoffs for an ATX motherboard already installed, and once you take those drive and cable routing plates out things are a lot simpler. There's plenty of space for installing the motherboard as well as wiring it up and installing any expansion cards you may have. Better still, Lian Li includes special thumbscrews for mounting the motherboard, making it that much easier.
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Where assembly is a little out of order with the PC-90 is when installing storage drives. Those go on the plates and the plates go in last, so before you do that, you'll want to install the power supply and optical drive. The power supply goes in easily enough; remove the mounting bracket from the back (attached with four thumbscrews), screw the bracket on to the PSU, and then slide the PSU into the enclosure and secure it. You can actually remove the top panel of the PC-90 if you're so inclined, but it's not necessary.
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Installing the optical drive involves popping the front panel off (it's designed to come off easily but also stay on securely). From there, you need to remove the fascia for the optical drive (held on by two screws), then screw in four rubber grommets and screws into the sides of the drive. Slide it in on the rails until it's in as far as it can go, then replace the fascia. The problem with this design is the same one that plagued the other Lian Li systems I tested: the button on the fascia just doesn't line up with the button on our Blu-ray drive, and there's no simple way to correct it. Understanding that not using the fascia might break up the PC-90's aesthetic, I think it's still a sacrifice worth making.
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Before installing the 3.5" and 2.5" drives, you'll want to make sure everything else is wired up first, and you may even want to have the power and SATA leads ready for the drives. The drives are mounted by using thumbscrews with rubber grommets; the drives pop into the plates and slide into a locked position, and it's actually reasonably secure. You'll want to consult the manual on how exactly to orient the drives, though, lest you risk installing them the wrong way the first time like I did. Lian Li wants the cables to be routed through the center plates (and accompanying routing holes), but I honestly felt like this was an untenable solution. End users may be better off removing the center plates outright.
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Lian Li's design for the PC-90 does feature one major shortcoming, and that's cable management. Given the way they intend components to be installed in the enclosure I have a hard time seeing how they could've done a much better job, but it does bear mentioning that much like many older enclosure designs there are going to be a lot of floating cables. Lian Li's engineers pay lip service to the idea of routing cables behind the motherboard tray, but realistically there's virtually no space back there.
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I'll confess that once I got everything put together, I was skeptical of how well the PC-90 would perform. This straightforward wind tunnel design can be absolutely fantastic (as SilverStone's smaller TJ08-E proves), but with all of the floating cables potentially obstructing airflow and few allowances for handling them, it's easy to see how the PC-90 could lose a lot of that cooling potential. Thankfully it acquitted itself very well when the time came to do thermal testing.
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ckryan - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
Lian Li's are difficult to build in for the most part. Especially the smaller ones. The PC V351 is a total bitch.just4U - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
The older cases were a joy to work with.. Still never had a better case then the Lian-Li PC60.. for it's era it was remarkable. I still have two in use today and I to work with alot of the new designs that come out so it's not like there isn't something to compare to.Todays' Lian-Li needs to get back to the basics and understand what we want rather then throwing weird our way and hoping we will buy..... and I hope their execs read this!!! I'd really like to pull the trigger on new lian-li's but for now i'll pass and keep buying from corsair and cooler master, with the odd nod to antec.
pandemonium - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
I, for one, enjoy the simplistic look of Lian-Li's cases.Robalov - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
Nice results, but for that price, it looks a mess.I would like to see cheaper iterations based around that design in the future however.
cjs150 - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
I love Lian li for much the same reason I love Silverstone cases, they dare to be different. There is a real attempt to rethink case design, unlike most case manufacturers whose idea of innovation is to stick a fancy front on the case and change the fans from 120mm to 140mm.Sadly like Silverstone sometimes the quality of construction does not match the originality of the original concept.
Mking the case 25mm wider and allowing for cables to be routed round the back would have been simple to achieve and immeasurably improved the case. Alternatively why not mound the drives behind the motherboard but with some channels for cable routing.
Fundamentally a nice try by Lian Li but not really convincing
DanNeely - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
To make that work with the giant mobo form factors they're supporting they'd also need to make it an inch taller to have space for cable holes on the bottom. Not sure if they'd also need to mess with anything on the front end since it's hard to visualize how a massive HP-TX board actually would sit in it.cjs150 - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
Maybe - although running cable holes down side of MB tray makes a lot of sense too.As a case I think it probably has real potential for watercooling but for a standard ATX board - radiators on front and bottom look rather obvious locations
Luay - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
For a single GPU build, any two or three 120mm fan equipped case from CM, Rosewill or Antec for less than $60 will do the job.For SLI/CF, any mid tower 140mm fan equipped case for less than $100 such as the Rosewill Blackhawk will do.
For Tri-SLI/CF, I'll start looking for the 230mm big boys, HAFX or the $150 Rosewill Thor.
For Quad SLI-CF, I'll need a case with two PSU mounts and a minimum of four 230mm fans such as the $200 Rosewill Blackhawk Ultra.
as for this case, no side fan means the two 140mm front fans won't push the air all the way to the exhaust fan at the back, if more than one GPU or any obstructive device is installed on the motherboard. The roof intake fan is already feeding most of the air to the CPU and the cooler if it's there. I don't think it's safe to install more than one non-vapor chamber custom cooled (inside-case heat dissipating) video card in this case!
I don't believe this is a gamer's rig at all and your recommendation for the PC90 as such worries me.
Iketh - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
Anyone who buys Rosewill is wasting money. Anything marked with Rosewill, run the other way as fast as you can.As for the rest of your post, you sound like a troll or a genuine retard.
Dustin Sklavos - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
I disagree. The Rosewill Thor v2 has shaky build quality, but it's not terrible. On the flipside, the case is an incredible performer and probably the best bargain for a full tower on the market today.