Lian-Li are the kings and queens of the brushed aluminium chassis and now it looks like they’re making a play for display cases too with their surprisingly diminutive PC-O10 case. And it’s only possible because somebody went and shrunk high-powered PSUs.
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It’s not that I spend a lot of time staring lovingly through the Perspex side of my PC at the fine array of componentry I have installed inside it, but yeah I kinda do. And with the wraparound glass sheets showing off every beautiful bit of hardware, from multiple angles, I’d probably never get anything done. Turns out I’m a massive hardware nerd. Who knew?
But while this little tower case is still able to fit in full-scale components for pretty much every category – able to fit in graphics cards of HD 7990 proportions, up to 340mm long – it can’t fit in full size power supplies. Lian-Li is taking a note from Apple here – that’s a feature not a flaw.
The traditionally painfully tedious PSU world has started innovating a little and now there are small form factor PSUs with seriously high wattage ratings. A quick look at Overclockers highlights just how many beefy SFX-L supplies there are now, going all the way up to 700W. That’s more than enough to cope with a heady mix of high-end components. I’ve been checking out an X99 machine from PC Specialist with a GTX Titan X inside and that’s only sporting an 850W PSU, and even at peak usage it hits just over half that.
With all that glass frontage though you’re going to need to sharpen up your PC building skillz though. To keep the frantic swan-legs below the surface though Lian-Li have partitioned the PC-O10, like Corsair’s Air 540 and their own PC-09, so that the tiny, many-tentacled PSUs can be hidden away. Your storage drives can also be hidden away behind the partition too, leaving only your glorious graphics card, CPU, cooler and high-tech motherboard on the other side, free of clutter and presented for your approval behind glass.
I think it’s a pretty damned sexy design and I love the way Lian-Li are keeping away from over-the-top, over-designed cases, keeping with clean lines and simple construction. The PC-O10 isn’t aggressively angular, it doesn’t have Stingray fins and there’s not an RGB LED in sight. They sure can design a case, but they’re bloody hopeless at naming them.
It’s also outrageously expensive. You can check it out at Newegg where it’s a wallet-frightening $250 and that’s with it on offer. Eek.