Something different to an everyday Antec: Lian Li PC-A05B

[Suosaaski]

I got bored of Antec P182/P180, it is just too huge. So I considered buying a P150. But since P150 is all too common, I decided to try something different, so I bought a Lian Li PC-A05B.

First of all, it's small. Very small. But from inside the case, it is very, very spacey. A lot spacier than P182 was. Apart from the fact that it only has two 5,25" slots, three (+ one for floppy etc) 3,5" slots. But I can live with having so little expansion room for HDDs and ODDs. Anyway, I have one pic now:



Hardware:
Lian Li PC-A05B
MSI K9A2 Platinum
AMD Phenom 9650 + Zalman CNPS-9500A
MSI RX3870-T2D512E-OC + Zalman VF1000

Of course it is not as quiet as my P182 was, since the Zalman CPU cooler is not as quiet as the Ninja I had in P182, but otherwise it is just fine.

The CPU and GPU run cool, and with the reversed airflow of the PC-A05B case, the memory finally has some cooling too thanks to the Zalman CPU coolers more open design than the Ninja had. Overall I am happy with the case, but I might consider adding some noise dampening material to the light aluminium panels. Remains to be seen.

[ryboto]

Very clean build. Had you tried the stock back-to-front airflow pattern? In my A05B I saw better cooling performance with that scheme. Also, I drilled holes in the bottom below the PSU so that a fanned PSU could draw in cool air from outside the case. You may also consider removing the hard drive bay for some suspension room. Otherwise, enjoy the case, it's a nice one.

[Suosaaski]

Very clean build. Had you tried the stock back-to-front airflow pattern?

It is back to front. What I meant about reversed was that it is reversed compared to a normal case which has front to back airflow.

Also, I drilled holes in the bottom below the PSU so that a fanned PSU could draw in cool air from outside the case.

That's an interesting idea, although I doubt I'll do any permanent modifactions to the case.

You may also consider removing the hard drive bay for some suspension room. Otherwise, enjoy the case, it's a nice one.

That would certainly make the hdds a bit quieter, but the stock mounts are very handy to change hdds with so I think I'll stick to them. The noise ain't that bad.

I am considering doing a fan swap for the Zalman 9500 ( http://www.silentpcreview.com/article284-page1.html ) and I am also tempted to try out different fan configurations on the Zalman VF1000 such as DreamKillers fan swap ( http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/2983/mg5656yo0.jpg ) or oscar3ds ( http://www.3doracle.com/build/vf1000_installed.jpg ).

[DaveLessnau]

I'm no expert on silencing, but I'm really wondering about the location of the power supply. It's in the same compartment with everything else, but is underneath the hard drives? Won't any radiated heat from the power supply rise into the hard drive area? Also, I don't understand the utility of a back-to-front air flow. Wouldn't the hot air be pumped out towards the user? From a noise perspective, I'd think that would lead to a lot of sound from turbulence. From a comfort perspective, unless the room were cold, I'd think that pumping hot air around the user's feet and legs would be a bad thing.

[ryboto]

I'm no expert on silencing, but I'm really wondering about the location of the power supply. It's in the same compartment with everything else, but is underneath the hard drives? Won't any radiated heat from the power supply rise into the hard drive area? Also, I don't understand the utility of a back-to-front air flow. Wouldn't the hot air be pumped out towards the user? From a noise perspective, I'd think that would lead to a lot of sound from turbulence. From a comfort perspective, unless the room were cold, I'd think that pumping hot air around the user's feet and legs would be a bad thing.

From my experience, the air was warm, not hot. I opted for a positive pressure system. Front fan intake, rear fan intake, hot air leaves through upper rear/lower rear vents and power supply. It worked well until I decided I wanted a smaller case.

[Suosaaski]

I'm no expert on silencing, but I'm really wondering about the location of the power supply. It's in the same compartment with everything else, but is underneath the hard drives? Won't any radiated heat from the power supply rise into the hard drive area?

In theory, but since the power supply exhausts most of it's own hot air and also there is an exhaust fan behind the HDDs to exhaust hot air from them. So the heat is not really a problem for the HDDs.

Also, I don't understand the utility of a back-to-front air flow.

It is most likely due to the location of the power supply. Since the power supply exhausts hot air to the front, it is not very logical for a case fan above the powersupply to suck the hot air back into the case. Also this way the CPU always gets cool air instead of air heated by HDDs and other components such as graphics card(s).

Wouldn't the hot air be pumped out towards the user? From a noise perspective, I'd think that would lead to a lot of sound from turbulence. From a comfort perspective, unless the room were cold, I'd think that pumping hot air around the user's feet and legs would be a bad thing.

That is not a problem for me at least, my case is located sideways on side wall of the room, so it does not really make a difference if the hot air is exhausted from the back or front.


PS. The location of the power supply is the main reason for the case being so compact and still be able to fit powerfull hardware such as 4-way crossfire setup and/or long powerfull graphics cards like the GeForce 8800 Ultra in the case.

[[F]bernZ]

Very similar to my setup. However, I ripped a page out of Mike's book from designing the P180.

I stuck a large piece of bristle board in between the video card and my CPU heatsink. Amazingly, not only did this drop CPU temperatures, it also dropped GPU temperatures.

I have one intake at the rear, one exhaust up front, power supply is an HX520 with the fan pointing down. All these additions actually creates a negative pressure case, but that just means air gets pulled in from the top vents and cools my video card. No pics right now, but they'll come up soon!

[protellect]

I'm using the exact same case for my file server. What do you think of the stock fans? I was sort of disappointed with them.

[Suosaaski]

I'm using the exact same case for my file server. What do you think of the stock fans? I was sort of disappointed with them.

Well, if you look at the pic, you'll notice the fans aren't stock anymore... yeah, they were very bad.