Detailed Interior Features

The trend these days seems to be to reduce the number of 5.25" bays and increase the number of 3.5" bays. I'm not sure this is best for most users, but it does make a lot of room available for fans below the 5.25" bays. Looking in through the rear of the Lian Li PC-V1020 with the hard drive rack removed, we can see that most of the front of the case is occupied by the two LED-lit 140mm intake fans. You can also see the oddly elaborate bracket and mount for the upper exhaust fan. I'm not sure why this is built this way or what advantages it has over simply screwing the fan to the top of the case. Many full-tower cases these days provide top mounting points for a 2x120mm or even 3x120mm radiator; the Lian Li PC-V1020 does not, but the case would need an extra inch or two of height above the motherboard for this to be a workable option anyway.

I wasn't able to find any air flow or noise specifications for the four fans included with the case. They're all rather quiet and don't seem to move a lot of air, and the front intake fans are not filtered. You can of course replace any of the fans with fans of your own choosing. Integrated fan controllers are starting to appear in much less expensive cases, and it would be nice to see something like that here.

The 5.25" bays include stealth covers for two optical drives (a nice touch). Flip-out levers operate locking pins to secure devices in the top two bays, but the bays are hardly tool-less: to install your optical drive, you'll need to remove the four thumbscrews holding the 3.5" adapter in the bottom bay and slide it out of the case, then remove the two small Phillips-head screws securing the stealth cover, slide it down into the area vacated by the 3.5" bay adapter you removed in the first step, and slide your drive in from the front of the case.

In addition to the adapter Lian Li provides to mount two 2.5" devices in the hard drive rack, there are mounting holes for a single 2.5" device directly above the power supply.

As I mentioned previously, this case has eight slots, necessary for most motherboards if you want to run a tri-SLI or CrossFireX system. Although Lian Li touts the PC-V1020 as having the "latest in tool-less design", it does not have the clever mounting clamps used to secure cards in some other Lian Li cases, opting instead for simple thumb screws. As is standard these days, a large cutout in the motherboard tray provides access for CPU cooler mounting hardware.

One expects a lot of room in a full tower chassis. Here are the clearances I measured for the Lian Li PC-V1020:

There should be enough room for any video card short of an ATI Radeon 5970 (12.25"), although a little Dremel work on the hard drive cage would let even that fit. Let's build a system in this case and see what it's like to work with.

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