Lian-Li PC-X510 WX Mid-Tower Chassis Review

Peter Donnell / 8 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Being a Lian Li chassis, constructed from vast amounts of high-grade black brushed aluminium, with a tempered glass side panel, this X510 was never going to be cheap. The RRP is $399 in the US and I’ve seen prices in the UK hovering around £299. Not cheap, but when you want something with this standard of build quality, expect to pay a premium price for it.

Overview

The Lian Li PC-X510 certainly isn’t for everyone, for starters, there’s only a small part of the system building market who even have a budget that can afford something of this calibre, but when you look at the Lian-Li range, it’s clear that their main focus is the professional market. Sure, this chassis would make a great start to any system for a typical consumer, but this chassis is clearly better suited to those investing in a power workstation build.

Fitting this chassis with a bank of RAID hard drives in the top compartment, as well as that powerful built-in air cooling configuration, while also benefiting from the powerful fan controller on the back, you’re on your way to building a great rendering system. The cooling potential here is perfect for a system that needs to run 24/7 at high loads, helping you maintain stable system performance and temperatures. There’s room for a high-end PSU, large air coolers on the CPU and there’s clearly no shortage of water cooling potential either. If cooling for the hard drives does prove too demanding, you can open up the top of the chassis and add an additional 2 x 120mm fans to help shift heat from the system.

Maintenance of the PC-X510 is super easy. The side panels are locked tightly in place, but can be pulled off without the use of tools, allowing you to get into the interior to maintain your components, the front fans can be removed using a pair of thumb screws, and even the fan blades pop out, allowing you to give them a really good clean. Not that the fans should get dirty quickly, as there are two full height magnetic dust filters on the front/side intakes, and there’s a slide out dust filter for the PSU, so airflow should remain nice and clean overall.

Everything else just sweetens the deal for this chassis, with four high-speed USB 3.0 ports on the front panel, as well as a slide-over cover to help keep them clean also; there are adaptors included to convert to USB 2.0 should you need them. The tempered glass side panel window looks stunning while also offering more durability and sound dampening properties vs a perspex panel. All of the fans are of a very high standard, come with fan grill protectors fitted and benefit from the fan controller. There’s a PSU shroud, excellent cable routing and so much more. In short, you wouldn’t expect anything less than premium quality throughout from Lian Li and the PC-X510 doesn’t disappoint one bit.

Pros

Class-leading build quality
Lightweight and durable aluminium design
Incredible black-brushed aluminium and tempered glass finish
Multi-chamber cooling design
Five high-quality fans pre-installed
Built-in fan controller
Excellent cable routing

Cons

Quite tall for a mid-tower

Neutral

The high price may put many off, but is a consequence of high-grade building materials and precision engineering

“Picking the right chassis for a high-end rendering workstation can be tricky, but the PC-X510 ticks all the right boxes for excellent cooling, storage capabilities, high-end hardware compatibility and at the same time, it doesn’t make any compromises on style or practicality.”