Lian-Li PC-A20B thoughts?

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jsl10

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Apr 2, 2008
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Curious if anyone has picked up and used this new case from Lian-Li? Looks darn nice to me. A bit high price wise but it looks like a very compitant case that could be used for a long time. I like the PCI card cooler fan that blows out the back. Anyway, since there are hardly any reviews of the newer Lian-Li cases, I was curious if anyone has tried this case and what you thought. Even if you haven't used it, I'd love to hear other's thoughts on it.
 
I dont have it but it looks very nice and even has the sound deafening material! but the hefty price tag is probably what everyone avoids since i doubt anyone can easily spend 400+ for a case. although i bet its roomy and I love the sound deafening material which could probably make it pretty quiet
I am a bit dissapointed though, it doesnt have wheels??"
 
Very good design with plenty of silence aimed features.
In space it comes near V2110 and PCI cooler is included. (PCI cooler fits to other big towers but doesn't seem to be available separately)
 
Its a big improvement over the PC-A10, but of course you gotta shell out almost $400 which makes this very nice case a bit too pricey IMO. :(
 
I agree that I think the PC-A10 is a great case. I'd love to hear from anyone that might have one already. I suspect that the lack of reviews and high prices are just to give time to flush out existing inventories of previous cases. Lian-li came out with so many new ones at the same time I'm sure a lot of the older ones still needed to be sold. But who knows. I hope the prices drop a bit soon. I don't expect this case to be $200 for what it is. But closer around $300 rather than almost $400 would be more reasonable. I'm buying up parts for my new system now as good deals are found so I suspect I'll have a couple more weeks before I'll need a case. Lets hope Lian-Li gets more resonable in their pricing of their new cases real soon or I'll have to look at others.
 
I just built a new machine with a LL PC-A20, fairly happy with the result. Components were: ASUS P5Q-E MB, E8500, XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 CPU HS, POWERCOLOR AX4870, Corsair 2x2GB DDR2, Corsair 620HX, 150GB WD Raptor and two Sony DVD-RW drives. I'll start with the bad part, the drive covers are flimsy and seat by some bumps that seat in the screw holes in the drive bay and a couple of them had fallen out during shipping. The drive cage was also slightly bent, maybe from the box of components that was zip-tied to it or maybe from damage at the factory, and this may have contributed to them falling out. I was able to bend it back into shape after removing the center divider plate. They really need to mount the two front most screws for this in the other direction as the access holes in the drive cage were the weak point that got bent and are mostly blocked by the front of the case, which is riveted on. I was close to returning it because of this but in the end I was able to get it looking like new with some gentle persuasion. The right hand side part of the tool-less drive mounting could be a bit better as well, my optical drives sat in the bay a bit loosely so I ended up putting a screw in them to keep them in place a bit more securely. In the end though the drives and covers ended up looking fine from the outside, I just would expect some of the covers to fall out again if the case was shipped somewhere again. They were secure enough to stay in as I installed all the rest of the components.

Ok, now for the good stuff. The door is nice and sturdy and reduces the case noise when closed, all the incoming air passes through it so it is actually a bit cool touch. I changed the door orientation without any big problems, you have to swap all the hinges/latches on the corners and the lock since the power/HD LEDs are in a fixed position on the door. The lock was a bit annoying since it's had to turn the nut around the barrel with the sticky back of the gasket grabbing at your pliers but not too bad. Installing the PSU was a breeze with the mounting plate and movable support. The support has some padding to damp any vibration, they also include another in case you decide to take out the drive cage and install a second power supply.

The motherboard tray comes out after undoing the two thumbscrews on the back, sliding it back about an inch, pulling the top away from the slots 1/4" and then lifting the bottom up out of the slot it sits in. They have some non-standard sized hex standoffs but include a small driver for them. Several screw patterns in the trey as well as some plate for some optional MB config I'm not familiar with. After mounting the MB I put on the CPU cooler, kind of a pain since one of the push pins was being difficult and kept popping out even when rotated in correct direction. Guess I should have gone for the backing plate after all. I mounted the fan to the cooler, put in the DIMMs and then was able to get the MB assembly back in the case easily. I think some other case MB trays have to be rotated in and thus have clearance problems with tall CPU coolers, not the case for this one since you can put it in almost straight, drop the bottom in the slot and then slide it back. Good thing too since the cooler would have been a bitch to install in the case due to the fan/VGA guide bar across that part of the case. I was able to route most of the front panel wires and top IO wires around back behind the MB tray and then through one of the bottom cable holes and keep them out of the way of the airflow and hidden if you just take off the one side panel. The eight pin power connector was just barely long enough to reach to the top of the case, through a routing hole and to the MB. The main MB power cable bundle was too thick to fit behind the MB tray along with the other wires so it had to get routed topside. I had to remove the slot cooler to install the video card, four thumbscrews secure it and it has damping padding between it and the back of the case. I mounted the angled fan so it would blow on the DIMMs. Hard drive was very easy to mount, just screw in the rubber grommets and slide it in the drive cage.

The machine runs quite and cool thanks to the rubber mounts, padding and large slow fans. The GPU cooler is by far the loudest thing in the system but so far you only hear it on boot when it kicks on full power for a few seconds. I can hear the hard drive when it's seeking but that's the price for fast seek times. I feel I have plenty of thermal headroom in the case, I don't think I've seen the CPU break 50C yet, so I could do SLI or some decent OCing should I want to. I ran through the end of crysis and didn't notice the fan noise, but I did have the speakers on :)

Any questions?

(yah, my sig is out of date now...)
 
I have the case, temporarily fitted my asus Z7S with 2x Xeons in it.

Nice box, probably the best Li-Li I ever owned, and I had about 10 from PC-60's to PC-71's.

The only gripe I have is if you needed to fit a rad to the roof the top panel cannot be removed as in the case of the PC-71 series - ie you can't just pop out a few rivets......it forms part of the front, and a bit of a bottom section, bend in a u-shape....

But, still a beautiful case.
 
Thanks for all the feedback. Sounds like it is a very good case! Other than the initial problems TroubleMagnet noted above, it sounds like the case to get. Just hope the price will drop a bit to make that possible! TroubleMagnet... I want to reverse the door as well. Glad that is pretty easy. But you said something about the power/disk LED's being in a fixed location on the door? From pictures I can not see any LED's on the door. Are there and where on the door are they? So you can see a power and disk LED when the door is shut? This is one thing I've been curious about since I can't see anything showing those in pictures. Thanks.
 
The LEDs are actually on the case, the door has a plastic light path for them though so you can see them while the door is closed. They are on the upper right and fairly small so they don't show up in pictures unless they are lit up. The power button lights up as well (blue LED, same as the power LED with the pass-through) but is totally hidden with the door closed. If you didn't case about the LED pass-through you could flip the door just by swapping the lock arm (no barrel removal just for that) and just swapping the hinge pin locations.
 
Oh there they are! Thanks for pointing that out. Now that I know where to look I see them. They are pretty obvious now when looking at:

http://lian-li.com/v2/tw/product/upload/image/A20/a20q02.jpg

Do you think it makes any difference which 5.25 bays are filled (I'll need to fill 3)? Since all the air intake for the upper chamber comes via the 5.25 bays, I was wondering if it would be better to fill the lower bays since the air slots are at the top. But then again, it might be better for cooler air to enter the case as low as possible. It probably makes no difference (it's sure is easy to over analyze things!).
 
I doubt it makes a ton of difference but you might want to skip a slot somewhere depending on what you're putting in there. I skipped the top slot but that was mainly because some of the top/front cables were a bit tight and the drive was hitting them. So if you want to put it in the top install the drive before routing the cables.
 
Just put optical drives so that there's one empty bay or bay with short device (many card readers/fan controllers are such) between them.
That way optical drives don't heat up disc always when it's in drive.
 
I am looking at getting this case my only concern is there doesn't seem to be any type of filter setup for dust?
 
My Lian-Li has a filter. Trust me, no big deal. Wanna see the pics of my case full of dust?

If you're clean and keep your floor clean then you probably won't have a dust problem (unlike me because I'm a slob). I just ordered 2 new ones, no dust filter. Either way, if you have lots of dust your case is going to get dusty.
 
Nighted said:
My Lian-Li has a filter. Trust me, no big deal. Wanna see the pics of my case full of dust?

If you're clean and keep your floor clean then you probably won't have a dust problem (unlike me because I'm a slob). I just ordered 2 new ones, no dust filter. Either way, if you have lots of dust your case is going to get dusty.
Click to expand...

Reason I said this is I have two lian li cases. One with a filters and one without. The one with filters does not get near as dusty as my other.
 
can anybody posts some pics please of this case? how is the cable management in this case?
 
Just google the part # and it brings up a few pics. I saw some pics of this case in the lian li gallery also on the last page in the case gallery forum. It is kinda hard to see how the cable management will work.
 
cant find it in the lian li gallery.hard to find because most people don't say what case they have and it makes thread searching useless
 
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