My new Lian Li V1000 Plus 2

[Kirth Gersen]

Finally, after 4 months, I got one. It's black and it's beautiful!

As many on the forum are interested in this model, and I certainly couldn't read enough about them while evaluating, I thought that I would write a few words about the installation (with a few piccies).

Remember, I'm coming from a 18 month old Antec P180. This was not really a bad case, very quiet, and did the job. But the door had fallen off (the plastic pins that held it up had broken - ie unfixable). The side panel plastic clips had mostly broken, so they were hanging off. Installation had been hell. The rubber feet had torn off from all the playing around I do with it, and it was heavy as hell. Steel with plastic parts is not a good combination. Now with the door off, it was, frankly, butt ugly. It had to go.

Here's a pic of the two cases:

I love Epox Mobos (always very reliable, and I'm no great overclocker), but this one has the power sockets in the middle of the board, so with the Antec, I had to trail the leads over the cards in the PCI slots . With the V1000, I was hoping this would get better.

Installation was much better than with the Antec. Slightly more room and access. It took a while to get the hang of taking off the panels. It's still not a silky smooth process, but much better than most cases I've used. Hard drives installation was nice - I liked the transverse design as it made it easy to attach leads. My drives are SATA 2, so no problems with reaching the ports. Fitting the Seasonic was not so easy - you have to thread the cables through the access holes before you squeeze the power supply in place.

The new toys that put the "+2" in V1000+2 were easy to attach - these being the GPU exhaust fan, and the metal plate that sits over the CPU cooler to direct the hot air to the rear exhaust, but it's strange not seeing all your hard earned components in one easy glance!

I will miss the ease of access to the front removable drives that you get on the Antec. But on the V1000, they've made it easy to screw in the drive on both sides of the case. With the P180, you're faced with a wall of steel on the blind side. The floppy bezel was quickly modded to hold my 3.5" media reader. The DVD bezel hides the DVD player and maintains the cases simple, yet stunning appearance.

Here of some pics of the final assembly:

Cooling and Noise. Here's where I had to start tweaking. I am very sensitive to noisy PCs, and the Antec, for all it's faults was very quiet. The 3 12cm stock fans with their individual speed settings were almost noiseless set on low. When I am playing a game, I want the ability to wap up the fan power pretty quickly, to maintain stability when noise is less of an issue.

With the V1000, the first thing I noticed when I fired it up was the racket. I kind of assumed that it's stock fans would have some similar speed settings as the Antec. So I fished an unloved Aerogate 2 fan controller out of the loft, and hooked it up to the fans, turned them all as low as possible (990 RPM). Not bad, but not great. Still noisier than the P180, and just on the wrong side of my tolerance levels. So I started doing some noise / heat analysis:

Ambient temperature was about 21 C. All readings were with machines idling for between 30 mins and an hour. The noisy Epox Northbridge cooler has always been unhooked (with no adverse affects); the trusty Zalman CPU cooler sits there at 25% using speedfan, and is close to inaudible; the HIS X1900XT cooler runs happily at 23% using ATITool (and is as quiet as they come at that speed). In short, this is all about the case fans.

P180 - 3 fans on low: CPU - 37 C, GPU - 52 C, Hard Drives - 45 C; a just audible, pleasant, deep whir.
V1000 - 3 fans full blast (c1550 RPM): CPU - 30 C, GPU - 51 C, Hard Drives - 28 C!; a bit of a racket.
V1000 - 3 fans c990 RPM: CPU - 32 C, GPU - 54 C, Hard Drives (not taken); slightly irritating noise level.

This gave me the following conclusions for my rig:

a) The GPU extract fan doesn't add much to the HIS's excellent GPU cooler, where, I'm sure, most of the heat gets extracted out the back - so I uninstalled it.
b) The Hard Drives were positively frozen sat next to their fan. Given that they had survived without one on the Antec - that fan was unplugged.

So:

V1000 - 1 fan (rear extraction) c990 RPM: CPU - 32 C, GPU - 55 C, Hard Drives - 50 C; back to P180 noise levels.

Conclusion. The V1000+ is cool city Arizona. I guess with it looking like a cheese grater, it's got to be really. But, it's also a tad noisy, so in order to get it back into line, the reduced fan levels make it just a bit hotter than the Antec P180. The heat levels are not critical, but I am keen to explore other noise management options (perhaps the T-balancer?).

So on balance my old and new machines do about the same job. However, when you add the V1000s low weight, better installation capability and overall Babe factor, I'm as pleased as punch.

Thanks to all those on the forum who helped me through this! One last pic:

 

[Kirth Gersen]

Yeah - the power supply is a tight squeeze isn't it. I managed it so didn't see a need to pull out the partition with the 2nd hard drive bay. I understand it'd perfectly doable. This bit is the biggest minus point with the whole case IMHO.