Lian Li PC-V360 chassis is loaded with common sense

Lian Li had a rather small showing at Computex, but did bring something rather important to the enthusiast PC market: a new, clever way of mounting a 240mm radiator for an all-in-one heatsink.

Conventional applications of 240mm radiators put them either at the front, top or bottom of your chassis and depending on that location, it can require the dimensions to be stretched horizontally or vertically to fit the cooler properly. But what if you wanted a relatively small, mATX high-end case that fits in a radiator but isn’t oversized, you’re kind of stuck for choice.

: Lian Li PC-V360

: Lian Li PC-V360 radiator swing

The PC-V360 looks rather normal. The PSU is back at the top, it’s a mid-tower chassis design and it holds just one DVD drive bay, sacrificing the extra space to accommodate up to five 3.5-inch hard drives and three 2.5-inch drives. The 2.5-inch drive bay at the bottom is cleverly positioned to allow the installation of longer graphics cards. If you’re wondering, yes, that is the Radeon HD5970 in there. Its longer than the Radeon HD7990 and the Geforce GTX690, so most cards will fit in nicely.

Lian Li kits out the rest of the case with a front 120mm intake fan, another 120mm fan on the rear as an exhaust, an optional 120mm intake on the bottom and a 80mm exhaust fan on the top of the chassis. The 2.5-inch hard drive cage on the bottom is removable, so one can fit in larger graphics cards.

The main benefit to as design like this one, with the side-mounted radiator, is that with a lot of water-cooling builds the VRM and chipset heatsinks are robbed of the air the stock fan coolers supply to them. Once you fit on a radiator, you have to still get air around the board itself so that the chipset and VRM capacitor bank doesn’t overheat.