Posted: April 29th, 2003
Written by: Justin "The Sheriff" Woods

Next up: The Bad

Let me say that when I say bad, I really just mean, less that what I would have expected or slightly frustrating case design or limitation. There is certainly more good than bad with this case, I just want to cover everything I can.

First, the case doesn't ship with a power supply, which is normal in most custom setups. The problem arises while trying to get one into the case; it isn't as easy as one would expect. Depending on the type of PS you get, you may, as in my case, have to pull the motherboard tray almost all the way out, as the lip of the fan grill gets caught on the tray. Now this may not happen to you, but having to swap out power supplies for any reason will be a bigger job than normal…of course, it only requires you to turn a whopping four thumb screws to get the tray out. This isn't Xoxide's fault, but maybe the techs at Lian Li can make a small revision and cut the case a few millimeters higher on the back. I found this to be the case with both an Antec "Truepower 430" and a "no-name" brand that came with an old Inwin case I have.

Pain in the ass power supply install and removal (say that 3 times fast)

The drive bay covers are irreplaceable, don't throw them away, you don't want to buy new ones!

Another small issue to consider is the bay covers. Since they are custom to the case, you don't want to lose them, but who wants to keep something like this in a drawer somewhere just to be forgotten or thrown away by accident or worse, used as a door stop? You might think this is nit picky, and again, this is something Lian Li engineered into the case, it looks great don't get me wrong, but the long sides make it difficult to stack and awkward to store. Bending them is out of the question as well; you'll just ruin them. Since Xoxide also offers aluminum drive covers for your optical drives and floppy, you could realistically throw this part away, but who knows, I think we're going to see more and more full-size (5 ˝") DVD-CDRW combo drives on the market soon, and you may not need two separate drives to get really fast CD-RW speeds. This is speculation of course, but just in case, hang on to the bay cover, you may need it some day.

Boo hoo, my Taisol K7 462 won't fit in the case, I guess I don't get to use it.

Last but not least in the bad category is the install of some one the newer heatsinks. If you're going to consider a heat pipe setup like the Taisol K7 462 in the picture above, think again, its way too hard to get on once the motherboard is in the case, I thought I was going to break my CPU, so I passed on installing an Athlon XP and went for a Thunderbird instead, since the heatsink fit into the case before I slid the motherboard tray in, I didn't have to worry about the somewhat cramped space around the CPU. Having bigger hands also had something to do with this as well; my big meaty claws don't exactly fit into all the nooks and crannies some of these case manufacturers have us using for space.

Next Page: The Ugly