Lian Li PC-A05N

Performance:

Installed inside the Lian Li PC-A025 was an AMD Phenom 9500 quad-core processor, ECS 790GX motherboard, an ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card, 2GB of DDR2 memory, a Mushkin power supply, and one Seagate 320GB Serial ATA 2.0 hard drive. For what it's worth, the system was running Ubuntu 9.04. Installing all of this hardware was extremely easy to do, even when it came to installing an ATX motherboard in this very petite chassis. Everything installed well and we ran into no problems. In fact, it was a delight to work with this Lian Li case. When the system was running we ran into no thermal issues at all and the system was extremely quiet with the stock cooling. The CPU temperature for the AMD Phenom 9500 was generally between 30°C and 40°C.

Conclusion:

With the Lian Li PC-A05N, some good things do really come in small packages. The PC-A05N is designed and built extremely well by the Lian Li engineers out in Taiwan. This case is very lightweight at just four kilograms and is sized very small for being a mid-tower, but an ATX motherboard can be easily accommodated along with three hard drives, three optical drives, and seven expansion slots. For those that do end up purchasing the Lian Li PC-A05N, even if it is loaded up with hardware it should run quite cool and also quietly thanks to the vibration reduction features found on this case.

This case is also a delight to work with and has easy yet reliable tool-free options. The only problems we encountered were a lack of Firewire and eSATA ports on the front of the enclosure. What perhaps is most impressive of all is that the Lian Li PC-A05N is retailing for just about $100 USD, which is an incredible bargain for being a Lian Li product and all of the features found with this ATX computer case. We would highly recommend the feature-full Lian Li PC-A05N for those looking at a lightweight and small ATX enclosure.