Lian Li PC-201 Aluminum Case

The bezel door has a snug fit that opens with a bit more than minimal effort.  The door gets away from the clips and magnet closures we have seen before to utilize a small ball bearing at the top and bottom edge of the bezel door.  Behind the ball bearing is a spring so that the bearing is partially pushed into a small hole on the frame holding the door in place.  There are two other features worth mentioning here on the bezel as well.  The first, is the small vinyl strip along the door's edge to help dampen vibration and keep sound to a minimum.  The other is the see through screen covering the Lian Li PC-201's large 120mm intake fan.  The screen isn't going to do a lot of filtering in and of itself but it is more for aesthetics than anything else.

     

Turning things 90 degrees to the right, we can see the 120mm side mounted fan we noted earlier with a small screen similar to that on the front bezel acting as a guard.  In case you missed it, I said "turning things 90 degrees to the right."  The Lian Li PC-201 is designed 'upside down' with the power supply at the bottom and expansion slots up top.  This means that access to its innards is through the right side panel instead of the left as is normally seen.

  

The rear shows off this Lian Li design much better with the components mounted opposite as usual.  Seven expansion slots are present which lay overtop a 120mm exhaust fan and the power supply area.  The power supply area at the bottom has its cooling augmented by two 80mm mounting points for case fans if you so choose.

Typically, we blow off a case's bottom in a review as who really cares about the feet.  In this instance we did want to point out upgrade thinking Lian Li has put into this case.  Lian Li makes a set of aluminum case wheels as an extra accessory for some cases.  These wheels do not come standard with the PC-201 but the mounting points are here to make their addition quick and simple if the end user chooses to add them later.

Everyone to their room!

The feature that will attract many folks to the Lian Li PC-201 is its compartmentalized design.  Below you get the full measure of this.  The PC-201 is broken up into three sections; the top half for mainboard and optical drives and the bottom half split in two for the PSU area and the drive area.  Let's look at each section individually for a closer look.

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