A Closer Look - Outside

Upon first inspection, the case looks very similar to the PC-Q07. It seems that is has simply been stretched a bit to allow for more space. The one big design change are the hard drive cages which now allow for more than a single drive to be employed - but more on that later. That said, the exterior overall look and feel has not changed at all and the Q11 looks like a bigger brother to the Q07.


Taking a closer look at the front, we can see the single 5.25 inch drive bay on the very top. Lian Li has chosen to include one of their ODD covers so no matter what color your drive is, it will be hidden nicely. If you look closely at the small thumbnail of this review and the retail chassis of this review, you will notice that the buttons and external I/O have been switched around in the final version of the chassis. Turning the Q11 around, we have a very similar back to the Q07, but with additional space in the bottom. Lian Li has also included a black PSU plate instead of the silver one found on the predecessor. Both sides of the chassis now have identical air vents and the large one intended to give the PSU access to fresh air has been removed. This also means that you will only have one viable option when installing the power supply later on.


Two mainboard expansion slots are a great feature, as they allow you to install a dual height graphic card, but since the chassis is very short, you will be hard pressed to actually find a card with this attribute which will fit. When using a single slot pixel accelerator, you have some extra space to route SATA or USB out the back for example. The top area is taken by the power supply bay and opening for the mainboard backplate. As you can see, the PSU bracket is held in place by thumb screws, which means that you will have to install the PSU in a different manner than in normal enclosures.


Lian Li has chosen to update the USB connectivity to 3.0 and still offers the pair of audio connectors as well. Since there is still no mainboard header standard for the new universal serial bus interface, you will be forced to route the cable out the back of the case to connect them to the rear mainboard connector.