A Closer Look - Inside

To gain access to the interior, simply remove the thumbscrews holding each panel in place. Taking a look at the insides, there are not a lot of unique extras. The only apparent signature items of Lian Li engineering are the screw-less locks for the optical bays. There are no hot-swap PCBs or screw-less locks for the motherboard expansion slots. You do, however, get their unique expansion slot lock/support structure. There is very little room behind the motherboard tray to route cables, so you will be hard pressed to keep things clean and tidy. With only two openings for cable routing, you are also forced to run most of the leads inside the case.


Lian Li has a solid divider running down the center of the chassis, with two openings for 140 mm fans and the aforementioned cutouts for the expansion-slot support locks. You may also remove this part if you have no need for it. There are also four possible placements for the black cable holder or "cable snake", as I call it. It normally does not come pre-attached, but was already pre-installed in our sample. The "cable snake" should at least aid in keeping unwanted PSU cables out of the way nicely.


The entire front is taken up by 3.5" hard-drive and 5.25" drive bays. The sides of the chassis each come with a long cage for up to ten hard drives. You could then easily stuff a whooping twenty 3.5" drives into the PC-D8000. Each cage comes with three 120 mm fan-mounting possibilities, which line up perfectly with their respective side panel opening, allowing you to keep the drives cool during operation.


The six external 5.25" bays on top are divided up equally between the two cages. Interestingly enough, only two of the six come equipped with Lian Li's tool-less locking mechanism. A single 5.25" to 2.5" adapter is also pre-installed into one of the bays, allowing for up to two SSDs to be placed within the PC-D8000.


Turning our focus toward the rear, both PSU bays are once again identical, with foam-equipped rails on which each unit can rest. The exterior frame allows you to install these units with the fan facing up or down. One can also easily slide them in or out through the rear, which should make upgrading or replacing them easier, especially if you use fully modular units. Above that are the three fan-placement possibilities on the left and the motherboard tray on the right of the central divider.


Pulling the tray out of the chassis is quite easy after you have removed the thumbscrews holding it in place. There are eleven motherboard-expansion slots. Each slot is protected by individual covers which are held in place by thumbscrews. Above that are two openings to route water-cooling out the back of the chassis, and there is another opening to place a fan here. While this is a big, gaping hole, the chassis does comes with a fan grill for it, but you will not be able to install this grill unless you actually install a fan there.


All the cables are of the standard variety, but most of them are also sleeved in black. As there are four USB 3.0 connectors in the front panel, you get two full headers. One can, thanks to the included adapter, be used for USB 2.0 connectivity.