Lian Li is one of the companies that always are on the forefront of case design and innovation. One of their trademarks is that they make cases in literally all shapes and sizes ranging from a near 3ft behemoth to a case the size of a big power supply. Another trademark of Lian Li's is that they love to use high quality materials which are usually followed by higher prices. Because of this, practically all of their cases are aluminum and its usually brushed. This results in a lighter and cooler case which in many cases also means that it is quieter.
Today, we will be looking at one of Lian Li's Mini-ITX offerings.
Mini-ITX is a standard that was developed in order to accommodate motherboards of an extremely small size that have minimal requirements. For scenarios where lots of PCI and RAM slots are not needed but size is of the essence. These motherboards are most easily described as the upper half of an ATX motherboard with less DIMM slots (generally 2 instead of 4). Such a small motherboard also means that there is going to be a very small case. This is where Lian Li's PC-Q08 comes in and fills the niche.
Features
The Lian Li PC-Q08 is a Mini-ITX case that supports a dual-slot full length (300mm) graphics card along with a full size power supply. This is important because many Mini-ITX cases require proprietary power supplies which are generally smaller than the ATX standard PSU and are usually less powerful and more expensive. Plus, with a very unique PSU you are very limited in your choices, as such being able to mount a full size ATX PSU is invaluable when considering that this case also supports a full length power hungry graphics card. This case also comes in three awesome colors, Black w/blue fan, Silver w/blue fan and Red w/red fan. Each 140mm color fan is complemented by a 120mm blowhole fan as well.
Another great feature of this case is the fact that it has a blow hole in the top of the case to allow for you to exhaust the heat out of your case. Many mini-ITX cases have a rear exhaust only and as a result, it is very hard to get any sort of air flow going through the case because the contents of the case are so cramped. In our build, we opted for a water cooling solution from Antec because in order to run a 2700K processor in a quiet and cool manner water cooling was necessary.
As such, we used the top blow hole to install the radiator of the water cooling setup. Also, because we used a water cooler instead of an air cooler we created more space between the PSU and CPU allowing for more air flow across the board. I would recommend that anyone building in these cases consider going with a water cooling solution at it is actually a much quieter and cooler solution for many reasons.
Another interesting thing about this case is that one of the side panels of the case is actually the motherboard back plate and when you remove one of the side panels you're effectively removing the entire motherboard assembly. This is extremely helpful because you can essentially mount the motherboard inside the case without having to mess around with all the tight spaces.
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