There are plenty of mATX enclosures using the shoe box design and the Lian Li PC-V351 is by no means the smallest of them all. But instead of trying to shrink things down and creating limitations and problems with the internal parts, the company has made the chassis as compact as possible without having to compromise what the user may install inside the case. The side mounted drive bays certainly help to keep the case as short as possible, while giving the user an interesting feature to boot. Another necessity of such an enclosure is the pull-out mainboard tray, which gives you the possibility to install all your components easily without having to worry about the constraints of the chassis. That said, you can easily stuff a high-end GPU, mainboard and CPU cooler into the V351, which is by far the biggest selling point of this case. This makes the unit the perfect choice for modern LAN party enclosures. The availability in six colors also gives you a large choice of colors to make the other LAN party guests go aaah!
Even though you still have to double check and plan what to fill the chassis with to a certain extend, along with the fact that a screw driver is still a requirement for all parts of the assembly process, the V351 does manage to balance size and functionality exceptionally well. That said, this is by far one of the best of its kind. As time goes on, the hardware requirements and possibilities change as well and Lian Li has done an excellent job in going with that change to give you the biggest possible freedom for a compact case like the PC-V351.