KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
The Lian Li PC-8FIB while a Midi tower design has been well designed to allow ample space to work inside. We fitted the Corsair AX850 power supply (review to be published shortly) easily enough and it rested on top of the rubber anti vibration mounts.
There is a cable management bar also supplied which can be used to keep all the routing as neat as possible.
We then used four of the thumbscrews to tighten the PSU into the chassis, again tool-less. There is a metal mounting bracket which fits into the chassis under the motherboard and then ‘clamps' down over the PSU into an aluminum socket, this stops vibrations and movement which can cause noise.
Our motherboard of choice for this particular system build is an MSI X58A-GD65 with our long standing Core i7 920 D0 processor. Installation was as straightforward as we hoped and again took only a few minutes. You will notice also Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3 1600mhz modules – these are some of our favourite memory modules and look amazing with a windowed case.
Micro ATX and ATX motherboards are supported.
The image above shows that there is a very little space at the top of the chassis to fit any customised cooling solutions such as the Coolit Vantage (review published shortly) seen here (it wouldn't work anyway as this is a 140mm fan mount). We have to remove the rear mounted 120mm Lian Li fan and fit the Vantage here.
The Coolit Vantage radiator and fan fitted into the rear of the Lian Li Case. It is important at this stage to connect the CPU power connector to the motherboard as it will be impossible to get at after mounting the CPU block.
The Vantage fitted and installed. Again this only took a few minutes – be sure to check out our full review of the Vantage, coming shortly.
To connect our OCZ Agility 2 SSD drive we used the supplied OCZ 3.5 inch mounting plate, Lian Li supply their own version which does the same thing.
A standard 3.5 inch drive can be fitted without tools by using thumbscrews as seen above – Lian li support rubber stoppers for these screws to stop mechanical based vibrations when the platter is spinning. The sata and power cables can be cleanly connected from the other side of the chassis, keeping them out of view.
The Lian Li chassis is fitted with one of the best PCI mounting systems we have used. To remove a metal slot, pull on the corresponding ‘arm' and it can be slid out with minimal effort. This is again tool-less and are mounted and held in place by a rubber padded arm which stops vibration. The brackets are also equipped with rubber pads to reduce noise and minor vibrations.
An eVGA 1GB GTX 460 fitted. The maximum video card size you can fit is 285mm which means the HD5970 at 309mm would prove an issue. You can remove part of the drive bay however to get them in.
Our final build, one of the most painfree and enjoyable we have experienced in recent months.
To further enhance the cooling properties of the PC-8FIB we fitted a high quality Enermax Apollish Vegas 140mm fan to the top. This is one of our favourite fans on the market right now and the LED's match this system build perfectly. Check out our review over here.
A few shots of the case fully lit up at night. Notice the Enermax Vegas fan top of the chassis. You can see this fan in action below.
