Excellent build quality, but very expensive with some fiddly design
Written By
Published on 21 March 2013
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1 / 4
Our rating
Reviewed price £170 inc VAT
The PC-A76 is one of Lian Li’s premium cases, and it has the looks to match. This full-sized tower is large enough to fit a huge HPTX-sized motherboard, but its aluminium construction helps keep the weight down to a reasonable 9.5kg.
The whole front of the case is concealed behind a door, behind which you’ll find two 5.25in drive bays. The rest of the case’s front consists of a grille which hides three of its four integrated fans, but while we initially found it easy to slide in our optical drive, we needed to reinforce the case’s mounting clips with screws to make it fully secure.
Behind the front fans are twelve 3.5in drive bays. This is room for more storage than anyone will ever need, but three of the bays can be used as 2.5in bays for SSDs. All the drive bays require thumbscrews and rubber washers, but we had no problems installing 3.5in hard disks or 2.5in SSDs.
The case has a VGA card support pillar, which is designed to give extra support to large and heavy graphics cards. We found this unnecessarily complicated, though. Unclear instructions didn’t help matters, but the tiny amount of support it provides isn’t worth the hassle. We’d recommend removing the pillar to increase building space.
The case’s front panel was another minor annoyance. It has two USB3 and two USB2 ports and audio jacks, but it’s concealed by a small flap on top of the case which must be kept open regardless of how many ports you’re using.
At this price, we expect perfection, but the PC-A76 has very few stand-out features that make it worth its premium price. The NZXT Phantom 630 gives you an awful lot more for £10 less.
Written by
Katharine Byrne
When Katharine's not glued to her Wii U and 3DS, she's usually found darting between tiny smartphones and huge pieces of home cinema equipment.She’s tested everything from laptops and monitors to motherboards and projectors, but she currently specialises in smartphones, games and AV.
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