Knocking on the Backdoor
The rear of the Lian Li PC-A7010 is about as feature laden as the backside of any other high end case. It’s at least as well ventilated, with there being a vent along side the PCI slots, venting at the top of the case (complete with fan and hard drive rack), and even vented card slot covers. There are two locations to install a power supply, which only requires removal of the secondary hard drive rack. This case even supports water cooling.
Above the rear 120mm fan, there’s two grommet holes to run tubing for water cooling through. Unfortunately, like many other cases that have this feature, the holes aren’t big enough to fit the 3/4″ OD (1/2″ ID) tubing that many enthusiasts are now using in their rigs. They will easily accommodate the tubing found in most all in one kits, but if you’re building your own water cooling setup with this case you’ll have to pick appropriate tubing, or start cutting. This of course voids your warranty, not that it has stopped anyone before.
Heading Inside…
The interior of the Lian Li PC-A7010 is extremely roomy and spacious. Like many other full tower cases, this one should be a breeze to work with inside. The motherboard tray supports every ATX form factor up to E-ATX. It’s also removable, though it doesn’t slide out. Rather it tilts out from the right side of the case. The lower power supply mount is designed with foam rubber standoffs and a vent, with the idea to support a bottom mounted fan. There’s also a support strut running the height of the case, which with some included accessories is used to support large expansion cards so they don’t bend or flex.
Should you have really large expansion cards, like those in the full PCI range, there’s support slots for each of the seven ports. This is one of the features that makes the PC-A7010 a good contender for cheap server case. The other big feature is the front hard drive rack, which actually has a SATA backplane that supports up to 7 SATA hard drives as we mentioned earlier.
This feature makes it easy for you to swap out hard drives without having to fuss with cables. It also makes it easy to hot swap drives should one crash and need to be replaced. The rack is almost toolless, except for the tools required to change the hard drive out of the mounting handle. If you have any type of RAID array, this is a much sought after feature. You just have to make sure your hard drives of choice conform to the standard for placement of the SATA and power connectors.