This looks really nice. Does anyone know how thick is the aluminum used on this? Would suck to pay almost 500 $ and receive flimsy and thin panels. Phanteks for example has 3mm thick aluminum panels on the evolve and it feels fantastic.
There is a place for full towers. I'm building a video editing system, and I need 6 10TB mechanical hard drives, 1 3.5" SSD and 3 M.2 drives, along with 2 or 3 high end graphics cards.
There is simply no way to effectively cool all this with a mid tower case!
Actually, a well designed mid tower can cool a video editing setup like that. Still, full towers do have their purpose in the market for other applications.
In high profile workflows (ie: workplace) this would be accomplished with two systems: 1) a NAS serving data to 2) a server that ingests/renders it.
It's more expensive to do it in this manner, but I'd say it's the better way to go, because you abstract the usage of big data storage and data processing into two different individual systems who don't quite need the other's specs. A NAS doesn't need high thread count, but does need mass data storage. An ingest/transform server doesn't need big local storage, just as long as it can access the data it's ingesting quickly enough (such that the bottleneck is still its own processing speed and not network transfer speeds), then data being fetched from a network drive shouldn't affect it negatively at all.
Really, the only reasonable (IMO) usage for full towers is mounting space for rads longer than 360mm. Everything else usually ends up being a strange system that really tries harder to be more of an all-in-one thing, when separation of different tasks might be a more robust solution.
I agree and going with two systems is not always the best solution. The last build like this for one of my customers had to be a single-system setup. He despised having two systems for this purpose, especially a NAS device. Lian Li makes elegant cases for this type of scenario.
There must still be a market for them if they're putting out new products. I can't imagine that the $500 full tower case market is big, but there are probably profits to be found out there despite the fact that home built desktop PCs are a bit of an oddity in modern times.
I still have Lian-Li's PC-V2000 sitting around. That thing was quite the beast, but while it was built well, it's quite apparent that it wasn't built for today's style and component choices given its heavily compartmentalized design. However, as mentioned, it's quite a rugged case, and it'll be interesting to see if this PC-V3000 is comparable.
This looks beautiful other than one issue - No external drive bays. If I'm willing to give up the real estate necessary for a full tower, having the ability to add an optical drive or hot-swap HDD bays would be extremely useful, and drive trays can be a nice profitable add-on as well
I'm glad to see an updated Full Tower case from Lian Li. For some of my system builds, this size is the best solution and Lian Li makes some of the best.
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haukionkannel - Saturday, August 26, 2017 - link
Any info if there is Also a version without the class side panel. I find those class windows unaestheticals.maximumGPU - Saturday, August 26, 2017 - link
This looks really nice. Does anyone know how thick is the aluminum used on this? Would suck to pay almost 500 $ and receive flimsy and thin panels. Phanteks for example has 3mm thick aluminum panels on the evolve and it feels fantastic.HomeworldFound - Saturday, August 26, 2017 - link
No, but all of their cases are built like tanks.Ej24 - Saturday, August 26, 2017 - link
Yeah Lian li does not make flimsy cases. At least none of the three I've owned have been flimsy.DanNeely - Saturday, August 26, 2017 - link
Other than the drive bay locations and front panel; this layout looks a lot like Case Labs SMA8 design.http://www.caselabs-store.com/magnum-sma8-customiz...
MadAd - Sunday, August 27, 2017 - link
*groanWhen will the industry finally give up rallying around full towers and commit them to history?
estarkey7 - Sunday, August 27, 2017 - link
There is a place for full towers. I'm building a video editing system, and I need 6 10TB mechanical hard drives, 1 3.5" SSD and 3 M.2 drives, along with 2 or 3 high end graphics cards.There is simply no way to effectively cool all this with a mid tower case!
tonyou - Sunday, August 27, 2017 - link
Actually, a well designed mid tower can cool a video editing setup like that. Still, full towers do have their purpose in the market for other applications.JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Have you considered the idea of two systems?In high profile workflows (ie: workplace) this would be accomplished with two systems: 1) a NAS serving data to 2) a server that ingests/renders it.
It's more expensive to do it in this manner, but I'd say it's the better way to go, because you abstract the usage of big data storage and data processing into two different individual systems who don't quite need the other's specs. A NAS doesn't need high thread count, but does need mass data storage. An ingest/transform server doesn't need big local storage, just as long as it can access the data it's ingesting quickly enough (such that the bottleneck is still its own processing speed and not network transfer speeds), then data being fetched from a network drive shouldn't affect it negatively at all.
Really, the only reasonable (IMO) usage for full towers is mounting space for rads longer than 360mm. Everything else usually ends up being a strange system that really tries harder to be more of an all-in-one thing, when separation of different tasks might be a more robust solution.
hlm - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I agree and going with two systems is not always the best solution. The last build like this for one of my customers had to be a single-system setup. He despised having two systems for this purpose, especially a NAS device. Lian Li makes elegant cases for this type of scenario.BrokenCrayons - Monday, August 28, 2017 - link
There must still be a market for them if they're putting out new products. I can't imagine that the $500 full tower case market is big, but there are probably profits to be found out there despite the fact that home built desktop PCs are a bit of an oddity in modern times.Aikouka - Monday, August 28, 2017 - link
I still have Lian-Li's PC-V2000 sitting around. That thing was quite the beast, but while it was built well, it's quite apparent that it wasn't built for today's style and component choices given its heavily compartmentalized design. However, as mentioned, it's quite a rugged case, and it'll be interesting to see if this PC-V3000 is comparable.btsfh - Monday, August 28, 2017 - link
This looks beautiful other than one issue - No external drive bays. If I'm willing to give up the real estate necessary for a full tower, having the ability to add an optical drive or hot-swap HDD bays would be extremely useful, and drive trays can be a nice profitable add-on as wellTaurus229 - Monday, August 28, 2017 - link
Nice case, but way too expensive for what it is.hlm - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I'm glad to see an updated Full Tower case from Lian Li. For some of my system builds, this size is the best solution and Lian Li makes some of the best.