Lian Li PC-V1020 Review

Lian Li PC-V1020 Interior

The interior of the V1020 is spacious, giving you plenty of room with which to work. Annoyingly, however, the inside of the case is made from basic raw aluminium, rather than the anodised black metal of the exterior. This is a slight disappointment on a case this expensive, as we’ve seen much cheaper cases with painted interiors. However, it's not the end of the world (unless you're a brave modder), as there's no side panel window as standard. It's nevertheless odd then that the red version of the case comes with a black interior.

This aside, the interior of the V1020 is excellent and stocked with the features you expect to find in a premium case. The motherboard tray is entirely removable, for example, which makes fitting the motherboard a doddle, and it also has cut-outs for cable routeing and the removal or fitting of CPU cooler backplates.


Lian Li has also taken the laudable step of filling the V1020’s fan mounts as standard. This means the case comes with two 140mm intake fans, a 140mm roof exhaust fan and a 120mm rear exhaust fan. This is an excellent arrangement, and means the V1020 comes with capable cooling straight out of the box. Lian Li has also fitted dust filters to both the front intake fans and the PSU intake grille in the floor of the case.

This is commendable, but annoyingly the hard disk caddy needs to be removed in order to gain access to the front two fans, meaning you’ll have to disconnect all your hard disks to clean the front dust filters. We also suspect that the dust filters will face an uphill struggle to keep the case clean and clear of fluff, as the CPU cooler is likely to draw in air through the vented front panel of the case, along with dust.

One of our favourite features of the case is the deceptively simple cable tidy tool that's located in the PSU chamber in the bottom of the case. This is nothing more than a moulded piece of plastic, around which spare or excessively long PSU cables can be weaved, but it does a great job of snaffling up all those extra inches of PSU cable you don’t need.


As mentioned earlier, the hard disk mounting frame can be removed as a single piece, which should give intrepid watercooling bods the possibility of mounting a dual 140mm-fan radiator to the two front intake fans. This will require either reversing the flow of air through the case (to back to front), or having the exhaust air from the radiators travel through the case. You would also need to find somewhere to stash your hard disks, which could become a problem if you’re using a 5.25in bay reservoir, as the V1020 only has two 5.25in bays and one external 3.5in bay.

Meanwhile, there's adequate room behind the motherboard tray for routeing cables, with even our fat 24-pin ATX power cable fitting comfortably. This, coupled with the size of the case, means building a system inside the V1020 is easy to do quickly and cleanly. We were also surprised to find that our 8-pin motherboard power connector could easily be routed behind the motherboard tray. This is something which hasn’t been possible in other large cases, such as the Fractal Design Define XL, but is simple in the V1020 due to the ideally positioned cut-out.