Preparation

Since I do not have a manual, some of the preparation was figured out by trial and error. At first I was baffled by the inability to secure the hard drive, but then figured out that one has to remove the bottom tray for the slim-line drive to give way to the holes of the hard drive bay. It holds a standard 3.5 inch drive, but it is possible to use traditional rails to install an SSD as well. It would certainly be nice if Lian Li could include such rails for the retail version. The drive lines up perfectly with the upper edge of the head component of the spider and will later be covered by the ITX mainboard.


Installing the slim-line optical drive is done as you would in any HTPC with such a bay. Four tiny screws are needed to hold it in place. At first I was aiming the ODD facing to the front of the entire case, but quickly realized during installation, that it should be placed in the opposite direction. You will see later on, how the correct installation looks. Nonetheless, for those with a slot loading unit, tilting the head back far enough should give you the angle needed to literally feed discs to the spider and make it spit them out too. This would simply not be possible with a tray loading drive, as the bay is placed too far back under the head to give you good access to an ejected tray, no matter how flat of an angle you have. You would be prone to damaging the hard drive PCB right above the drive instead.


Once both the hard drive and the optical drive are placed in their respective bays, the head piece is ready for the mainboard. Lian Li supplies tall and slim thumb screws and the ITX standard only has four holes on the board, thus securing the Zotac ION board is a quick and painless task. One obvious downside of the current setup is the lack of a frame to secure an expansion card like a graphics card. Such a unit should be easy to design and cheap to produce, but does expand the functionality of the PC-T1 nicely. Lian Li may well be preparing to ship such a part in the final product, as there is a screw hole right in line with the PCIe slot of the mini ITX board.


Preparing the power supply is very similar to installing it in any traditional PC, but here you place the plates on either side and secure the PSU with the included black screws. This contraption then forms the tail of the spider.


Placing the cable management clip unto one of the two possible locations is the last and only part required for the center piece of the spider. Now we can move to the fun part - connecting all the major body parts.