Lian Li PC-T60 ATX Test Bench
Assembly:
Lian Li has made some truly wonderful cases in the past such as with the PC-A05N, but this is our first Lian Li product that required real assembly. Unfortunately, Lian Li is not as good at producing English assembly guides as they are at designing cases themselves. The assembly guide is printed in four languages with the English instructions taking up two sides of paper. The assembly guide offers up a very small picture of the assembled test bench itself, the case components, a hardware list, and then the actual assembly instructions that are accompanied by very few words and then a small black and white picture representing the step. The average step is just written as "Bottom panel with rubber cushion" when the step is to place the four rubber cushions with their sticky backing to the bottom of the test bench's bottom panel. For another example, a later step is "Use A screw to secure PSU support bracket on the bottom panel", but the black-and-white pictures are small and can be hard to see what holes on the bottom panel they are referring to. The assembly also is not just attaching a bottom panel to a top panel, but there are about 21 steps to the assembly process.
Lian Li's assembly guide for the PC-T60 was not great at all and after looking it over, we ended up just pulling off a high-resolution image of the ATX test bench from the Lian Li web-site and using that as our assembly guide. Simply looking at a high-resolution image of the assembled bench was much more helpful and useful than this two-page assembly guide with scant instructions and small images.
In terms of the build quality of the PC-T60 components itself, the quality is nice like other Lian-Li products and is made almost entirely out of aluminum. The matte black finish was nice, however, it did end up being easily scratched during the assembly process. This open-air chassis though is certainly much nicer than the HighSpeedPC Tech Station that was reviewed back in 2005. The power supply, three 3.5-inch hard drive bays, two 2.5-inch hard drive bays, and two 5.25-inch drive bays, are located underneath the micro-ATX / ATX motherboard tray. The reset and power switches along with the USB/eSATA/audio connectors are integrated into the motherboard tray. On the motherboard tray there is room for eight expansion slots.