Lian Li PC-A55 Case Review: Unfortunate Name Befits the Design

Conclusion: Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should

Joking about the Lian Li PC-A55's unfortunate nomenclature aside, this was an extremely unpleasant review to write. A bad review can be fun for the end user to read, but snark comes cheaply and people put time and energy into designing and producing this case. People that I have to answer to, and people that I want to encourage. Lian Li's case designers seldom seem particularly bound by convention, and sometimes that results in some really stellar designs.

I was personally very impressed with the PC-90, a case not too much larger than the PC-A55 with absolutely stellar thermal performance. I didn't like how drives were mounted inside the case, but Lian Li was able to produce an HPTX-capable case in roughly the same dimensions as a standard ATX case from a competitor. Not just that, but it also offered better thermal performance than most of the competition.

Fitting an HPTX build in an ATX form factor and having it run efficiently is something I can see as having some real merit, even in corner cases. Yet when you try to fit an ATX build into a Micro-ATX form factor, thermal performance becomes substantially more important. We're at a juncture now where there are very few reasons to go with an ATX motherboard over a Micro-ATX board. One of those is if you're putting together a multi-GPU system, and that's a use case you can throw right out the window with the PC-A55 due to the way the cooling is engineered. With that out of the way, I see very little reason to go with an ATX motherboard if it can be avoided. Motherboards are so fully-featured at this point that expansion cards just aren't as relevant as they used to be.

In the end, the PC-A55's cooling design is fundamentally and fatally flawed. Adjusting orientation of fans and cooling inside the case wouldn't be optimization, it would be damage control. The graphics card is basically fighting for air with the power supply, and the CPU heatsink is essentially almost completely choked off from fresh air. Even with the bottom-mounted intake clear, thermals don't improve enough to justify going with the PC-A55 over a similarly sized Micro-ATX enclosure.

So how do you improve the PC-A55? Unfortunately it's difficult to do so without increasing the dimensions of the enclosure. If we're going to stick with having a bottom-mounted intake fan, we need to raise the case off the ground high enough that it doesn't matter what surface it's on and we need to make sure cool air can easily get inside the case. One of the biggest issues is the orientation of the motherboard; bottom to top airflow works in other cases because there's a nice channel for the air to flow through, cooling the CPU, GPU, and other components in the process. If Lian Li wants to do bottom and top mounted fans, the motherboard has to be rotated ninety degrees for it to work effectively. The vertical power supply mount also needs to be flipped 180 degrees and then the front panel of the enclosure needs ventilation for the PSU. And after we've made all these changes, we're basically left with...a Silverstone case.

Ultimately I feel like all Lian Li's engineers have done with the PC-A55 is prove that they could make a small case that could still support a full ATX motherboard. In the process, we lose a tremendous amount of thermal efficiency and acoustics go up catastrophically as a result. What are we left with? Unfortunately, a case I can't find any argument for.