Lian Li PC-A79 Aluminum Chassis Review

Final Thoughts

Price

If you want to purchase the PC-A79 then you need to be ready to make a big investment, with online prices ranging from £250 – £300 it is far from budget friendly, but in terms of features and build quality I’m amazed that it only costs as much as it does, it feels like it should cost more.

However expensive, the price is relative to the component support, if you’re looking to add huge numbers of hard drives, a dual socket motherboard, several graphics cards and a huge PSU, then £300 on a chassis is likely to be one of the cheaper components of such a build.

Conclusion

If you’ve just sat and read this whole review I think it is pretty obvious that this chassis is nothing short of faultless. Every little detail of it has been precision crafted to perfection and the level of detail on the HDD adaptor brackets alone is proof of that. Lian Li have built a huge chassis for the extreme end of the PC market, but then they’ve gone in and added little touches and details, such as the rear wheels, that make working with and maintaining your high end build that much easier.

Six high quality fans have been included, more than enough to provide powerful airflow to a chassis of this size, regardless of what components you throw inside it. The use of a fan controller may not go a miss should you want to keep control of cooling performance vs noise, but chances are that noise is the least of your worries if you intend to saturate this chassis with components.

The highly modular storage bays are fantastic to work with, changing a hard drive is quick and easy and with room for 17 hard drives in total thanks to the 12 5.25″ bays and additional 2.5″ drive mount. Then we have room for 11 expansion cards, likely more than most people will ever need. HPTX motherboard support and room for some seriously huge air coolers thanks to the wide chassis design. The only limit is that I can’t get a radiator bigger than 240mm in the top, beyond that, every major component on the market today be compatible with this chassis.

Overall this is in many ways the best chassis I’ve ever worked with, but it is no going to be ideal for everyone, obviously. It looks like it belongs next to a desk at CERN rather than in my office, but if you are planning on building a quad-SLI, dual-zeon powered epic RAID array system, then look no further than the PC-A79.

Pros

• Extensive component support
• Legendary Lian-Li build quality
• Six fans pre-installed
• Modular 5.25″ storage bays
• Radiator support
• Cable management

Cons

• None, it exceeded our expectation in all areas.

“Lian Li have set about creating one of the best HPTX chassis on the market and they’ve succeeded in style. This chassis can hold something akin to a compact super computer and still look neat and professional from the exterior. It may be expensive, but it looks, feels and performs so well that it feels like a great deal.”