Lian Li PC-TU200: On the Road With Lian Li

Conclusion: Needs to Go Back to the Drawing Board

Lian Li's goals with the PC-TU200 and its intended purpose are both admirable and, in my opinion, realistic...at least in concept. I'm not 100% certain Lian Li could be successful with what they're trying to do without adding an inch or two here and there to the TU200's dimensions, but I don't think it's out of the question either. The all-aluminum design Lian Li is famous for is a great fit for something that's supposed to be a portable LAN machine, and the handle is both sturdy and useful. The TU200 is small enough that the handle is actually practical as opposed to just being a cute idea.

Their central idea in terms of airflow and cooling is a proven if underused one as well: a single large fan, lined up directly with the internal components, can maximize cooling efficiency in ways that many larger cases still haven't figured out how to benefit from (for example, it pays off in spades in the SilverStone FT02 where my i7-990X's core temperatures idle at an average of about 24C.) This is something that we know works well; even SilverStone was surprised at how effective this type of design was in the TJ08-E that basically obsoleted their high end FT03 at about half the cost.

The problem is that parts of the TU200 just feel grossly over-engineered, and as a whole the enclosure needs to go back to the drawing board. If we take the question of whether or not they should stick with an ATX power supply out of the equation, we're still left with the case's biggest flaw: the drive cage. Its bulk makes several ATX PSUs difficult if not impossible to include, and it's not exactly a tool-less design. I suspect Lian Li was trying to make it easy to swap hard drives in and out of the TU200, but honestly I think a lot of enclosure designers tend to overvalue that ability. This case is tiny and meant to be portable, and I just don't think the sacrifices made to allow the end user to swap drives a little more easily are worth it. By just slimming down the cage and using flat-headed screws and silicon grommets the way Antec often does to lock the drives into place, Lian Li can score a little bit more interior real estate.

I also appreciate that you can install basically a grand total of five storage drives in the TU200, but in a case this small that seems excessive. At most I'd want to see enough space for an SSD system drive and maybe two 3.5" drives. Making that change could also potentially increase the interior real estate again and allow for improved air flow from the intake fan. If you were to populate all of the drive bays with the current design using traditional mechanical hard drives, even with the large 140mm intake fan the internal drive temperatures are liable to get dangerously high under load—and that's without adding a GPU to the mix.

Since we're compiling a wish list anyhow, I'd also strongly suggest moving the ports somewhere else, either removing the increasingly less relevant optical drive bay entirely and putting them there or placing them in a row at the top of the case. Placing them at the bottom has two adverse effects: it keeps them a bit out of the way (though I get the feeling the TU200 is meant to be placed on a desk or tabletop), and it covers up space that could be used to ventilate the video card. By moving them, you can potentially increase the size of the intake fan and allow it to grow into the area where the video card is meant to reside, providing it with cool outside air instead of relying on a single vent that threatens to be blocked off by carpet or even just the table the case rests on.

There are enough lessons that can be gleaned from this design that I'm confident Lian Li could turn around and produce a revision of this case that would be able to serve the same purposes while performing worlds better both thermally and acoustically, all at the same cost (if not less). I'll admit I don't think our testbed represents a particularly good combination of components for a unique specimen like the TU200, and that a smart end user could probably build a pretty solid machine in it by very carefully choosing the components used. The TU200 is a very new design for Lian Li, though, and it needs a lot of refinement. $179 is just too much to pay for a rough draft; hopefully Lian Li will produce a second generation design that alleviates the issues this one has. Done right, that one could be a very easy recommendation.