Visual Inspection
The front exterior of the PC-A7010 has a rather typical collection of external 5 1/4″ drive bays; five to be exact. The lower fifth drive bay can be converted to a 3 1/2″ bay should you need to install a memory card reader, or are still tied to the so-obsolete-it-won’t-die 3 1/2″ floppy drive. Tape drive and ZIP drive users are not excluded. The entire bezel is aluminium and snaps off with a simple pull, much like the drive covers themselves. As for activity lights, there’s only a single blue power light and a single red IDE light. Below the drive bays resides the power and reset button, and some ventilation for the front fans.
These details look pretty pedestrian from the outside though, but once the bezel is pulled off things start to look much more interesting. The power and reset buttons, for one, are not the normal spring loaded momentary switches. Rather they are much higher end (in terms of electrical components) microswitches, like those behind the buttons on a car stereo. Next to the power and reset button resides something much more interesting: A slider switch with three separate settings. This switch controls one or all of the fans inside the case (there’s enough power connectors for all the fans within), and the settings are for low, medium, and high. It would be nice if this switch was accessible directly from the bezel in some fashion, but the bezel has a good set of friction spring clips that make it easy to remove.
The two fans at the front, which are controlled by the afore mentioned switch, are the only intake fans on this case. This makes them quite easy to filter, and there are two anti-dust filters adorning the front under the bezel to facilitate this. They are easy to remove, easy to clean, and do a decent job keeping dust bunnies from cultivating in your PC.
Moving back to the top of the case, we get to see another intelligent design choice by Lian Li. Most people keep their computers on the floor. Odds of this chosen placement go up when the computer is housed in a case as huge as the PC-A7010. It is with that in mind that Lian Li decided to install the external ports on the top of the case. There are connections for eSATA, Firewire, USB, and front panel audio. Thankfully the cables behind these ports were made extra long, and should reach all four corners of any motherboard.