Elegance in Aluminum – Lian Li PC-A61 Chassis Review

Lian Li is to PC chassis as what tailor-made suits are to men’s clothing. Sure, they cost more, but the higher quality and generally improved design usually makes the premium worth it. Does Lian Li’s mid-tower PC-A61, then, live up to the company’s legendary pedigree? There’s only one way to find out.

Ah, Lian Li.

She – err, I mean the company – was one of my first loves in this hobby. Back when I started building my own PCs in 2006, I wanted to buy one of its iconic PC-V2000 chassis and put my first Socket 939-based system in it. I would have settled for the smaller PC-V1000, actually, but even that smaller model was too much of a challenge for my spending power back then. To say that both the PC-V2000 and the PC-V1000 were both “dream cases” for me would still understate just how much I loved (and still love) these chassis designs.

I mean, how could you not feel such strong feelings for them, especially if you fancy yourself as a chassis fetishist as I do. The PC-V2000 and PC-V1000 share basically the same design DNA, with the only difference really being in scale. Both are based on the distinctive inverted reverse-ATX motherboard mounting platform: Where, on a regular ATX spec chassis, the motherboard is mounted on the right side of the chassis with the CPU closer to the high-end of the chassis, the inverted reverse-ATX spec has the motherboard on the left side, with the CPU on the bottom. This was thought to have conferred a cooling advantage in favor of GPUs, since they were elevated. I can’t really say I’ve ever seen this to have ever been true, but the fact that it’s distinctive gives the PC V-2000/1000 a huge helping of bonus cool points.

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