Lian Li PC-888

More Interior

Other than the flawed removable motherboard tray there are some nice inclusions within the PC-888 though, and we especially like the two dual drive SATA hotswap drive cages. Another feature carried over from the Lian Li PC-X2000 (and more recently the PC-9), these drive cages make fitting and replacing hard disks a snap – just fit the drive with the appropriate screws and fitting rail (also in blue anodised aluminium – a lovely little touch) and slide it into the cage before sliding two clips down to secure.

Another feature we really like is the PC-888’s built in fan controller, and for once Lian Li hasn’t placed the controls in an inexplicably stupid place – the speed control is mounted sensibly on the rear of the case, and replaces the usual high/medium/low switch with a more conventional control knob (stop giggling, Joe) to manually adjust fan speed.

The PC-888 is equipped with three cooling fans, two 140mm front mounted intakes and a single rear mounted 120mm exhaust, and all three are pre-wired into the controller, with an extra 3-pin fan mount available if you want to connect a forth fan in the future. However, other than the three included fans there are no other fan mounts in the PC-888, so no way to further improve fan performance.


Fan speeds can be altered between 1,500 and 1,050 RPM and the blue LED lighting of all three fans brightens and fades as you speed up and slow down the fans. It’s a well thought out and well put together cooling setup to be honest, and as we saw with the PC-X2000, the use of plenty of intake fans in close proximity to the core hardware can produce very good thermal performance.

However, there is one very serious flaw with the PC-888’s internals and that’s the cable routing, or rather the complete lack of any. With the PSU mounted in the top of the case, cables have to be fed down the back of the hard drive cages, a process that borders on the incandescently frustrating. Trying to twist and manhandle a PSU’s bulky 24-pin cable is hard enough without having to twist it through three 90° angles just to plug the damned thing in, and threading the 8-pin CPU power cable or PCI-E cables round the back of the case is a fiddly horror story I wouldn’t wish on anyone.


It just seems that Lian Li has forgotten that cables need to actually run from the PSU to the main compartment, and that they aren’t always super thin or super long. It’s a shocking design oversight and at more than one point whilst building our test setup I was close to hurling the entire chassis, hardware and all, across the room in frustration and disgust – the cable routing really is that bad.

So an innovative shape and a wonderful build material aren’t quite complimented by the internals we’d been hoping for, and while there are some good features here, the PC-888 still leaves a lot to be desired. But how does it perform in our thermal testing? Lets find out.