Internal Blueprint

The Lian-Li Mini Q PC-V354'south innards are merely as simple equally its outside blueprint, only again, this isn't a bad thing, and the case does take enough of clever features. With the side panels removed, you're presented with what can simply be described every bit an empty box.

The right panel pulls double duty as a motherboard tray, which has eight permanently installed mounts. The enclosure supports Micro ATX/Mini-ITX and Mini-DTX form factors, only we suspect it will exist used primarily with Micro ATX motherboards. Since the motherboard tray is also a door panel, it's easily removable for installation.

The case floor has room for a pair of 2.five" SSDs and behind that is a mounting plate for an ATX power supply. While the case is meant for a standard ATX ability supply, it can adapt slightly oversized units. The power supply tin can be removed using a bracket that we'll talk over more than in the installation segment of this review.

The front features iii separate modules to house the five.25" drive forth with upward to seven 3.5" drives. The 3.5" drive cages have pre-installed anti-vibration grommets and Lian Li has intelligently carve up the HDD bays into two separate cages, allowing gamers to remove one and sacrifice extra storage for powerful graphics.

Gamers typically desire extreme graphics while HTPC users desire plenty of storage, and neither actually demands what the other has. Removing the second cage makes room for video cards from 23.5cm to a whopping 35cm long, giving the Mini Q PC-V354 the all-time graphics card support of any small case. Ditching i of the cages leaves room for three 3.v" and two ii.5" drives -- enough of room for 6TB of storage, surely enough for most gamers.

We plant the Silverstone SG04 (the master competition) to be inadequate when it came to cooling, so we were concerned that Lian Li's new offering would suffer the same shortcoming. The SG04 couldn't fit tower CPU coolers and even stock coolers would scream. Adding to that problem, and what was probably a larger issue, the SG04 had no frazzle fans to remove all that heat.

Fortunately, the Mini Q PC-V354 takes ventilation more seriously with two 120mm front intake fans sporting grit filters. The black and silver versions have blue LED fans while the cherry version gets red fans. Meanwhile, a 140mm exhaust fan is fitted to the top of the case and there is room for an optional 120mm fan in the rear. This is a serious amount of airflow for such a small enclosure.

All of the included fans along with the optional 120mm fan can all be run off the built-in fan speed controller. It's also worth noting that the three pre-installed fans also feature internal fan grills to help keep wires from existence damaged which is very important in such a small example.

The front panel USB 3.0 has a pair of connectors that plug into the motherboard if it supports USB three.0. If you don't take USB iii.0 or don't want to utilize information technology in this style, Lian Li has supplied a USB 3.0 to USB two.0 converter which plugs into one of the motherboard's USB ii.0 headers.