Assembly

Installing the mainboard is quick and simple. Just place the unit on top of the pre-installed spacers and secure the board with the supplied screws. As you can see, I started with my cable management early on, so that I would not have a huge mess at the end.


To install the hard drives, you have to remove the cage as the rubber mounted screw holes on the right side are not reachable otherwise. As you can see, I have installed a 2.5 inch drive on the bottom bay. This means that all of you using SSDs should have no trouble including it within the PC-A04. Even though I am using a fairly old dual slot graphics card you can see that it is already pretty close to the cage itself, but as we will see later on, it fits - barely.


Inserting the optical drive is no big feat either, just slide it into place and lock it down - no tools required. The system actually holds well enough, so you do not need to install a screw unless you plan to travel with the chassis.


Last but not least, the PSU installation. This part is a bit tricky, as the A04 is very compact. You have to slide it in the rear of the case. Such a system allows you to use fairly large units, but the one in this review was placed there by traditional means, even though it is larger than the bulk of units out there.


Once everything is installed, you can see that things do get messy. Using a PSU with cable management is strongly recommended as anything else will just fill the case up. Even though I only installed the minimum number of components, things are already somewhat unmanageable in terms of cable routing and hiding. As you can see, the PCIe connector was reachable - even with the HDD cage installed.

Finished Looks

Once the doors were placed back unto the case, nothing hints at the cable mess in the interior. The A04 makes a really good impression. I have to admit that I am a big fan of clean straight looks, but that is just my personal opinion.


The optical drive lines up perfectly with the front of the chassis, but there is a bit too much space between the drive and the panel, so that light from the power LED can bleed through there. This is not the first time that this issue has been pointed out, as many other Lian Li cases have the same configuration. A simple cover or divider installed on backside of the front panel would do the trick and solve this aesthetic issue. As you can see, the black USB 3.0 cable was routed out the water cooling hole in the back and connected to the USB plug in the back of the board. All in all the Lian Li A04 manages to keep up the overall appearance of the Lian Li gene pool nicely I would say.