Lian Li PC-V2120 Review

Lian LI PC-V2120 Interior

Having popped off the side panels via the clever single-screw latch system, you really get a sense of the enormous size of the case. The interior is opulently spacious and dwarfed our standard ATX test gear. The V2120’s entire motherboard tray can also be slid out of the case’s rear, allowing for easy motherboard, CPU cooler and graphics card installation outside of the case. Sadly, though, there’s only a cut-out for a single CPU cooler, which is a shame when you consider that the V2120 is capable of accommodating dual-CPU motherboards.


Unlike the exterior, the V2120’s interior is furnished in plain aluminium rather than luscious anodised aluminium. Lian Li sells an anodised inside-and-out variant in the form of the V2120X – but it costs roughly £30 more. Considering the already eye-watering £390 price tag, though, why wouldn’t you pay the extra for an anodised interior?

Raising the height of the case is what Lian Li calls a VGA pillar bar; a strut of aluminium that can be used to support the weight of larger graphics cards. However, the fittings for doing this are fiddly and the fact that the pillar bar intrudes into the case – reducing CPU cooler clearance considerably – means that it’s a waste of aluminium.


Ditching it is no major loss, though, as it does little to reinforce the case’s structure, which, impressively for such a large and aluminium case, is reassuring sturdy.

The V2120’s PSU mount is in the floor of the case, and is fitted with rubber strips on the mounting rails to reduce vibration, along with a plastic cable tidy strip to make tidying your PSU cables easier. There’s also a dust filter-equipped vent underneath the PSU, while an aluminium plate divides the PSU and motherboard compartments.

This divider has plenty of pre-cut cable routeing holes, but while the resultant cabling in the main chamber looks tidy, and the case’s front panel cabling is hidden, we’d prefer to hide our power cables behind the motherboard tray. More frustrating is the fact that Lian Li doesn’t include an 8-pin EPS12V power cable extension – an essential extra considering the size of the case. We tried some spare PSUs and none of their 8-pin cables could stretch the distance.


As well as the two 140mm intake fans fitted into the front of the V2120, there’s also a 140mm fan mounted on the inside of the case’s large removable hard disk caddy. The case also includes a pair of 120mm fans, one of which is fitted into a repositionable triple-bay 3.5in drive caddy that occupies three of the case’s five 5.25in drive bays, and a second fitted as a rear exhaust. This is a logical layout, with the 140mm fan mounted inside the case ensuring direct airflow over hot components, despite the case’s size.

Also impressive is the V2120’s titanic drive capacity. The aforementioned five 5.25in drive bays are joined by 13 3.5in drive bays split between a single large caddy, a smaller second caddy next to the PSU and the triple-bay 3.5in drive mount that can occupy three of the five 5.25in drive bays. This makes the V2120 well equipped for even the most massive home server builds; we reckon that 26TB of data should be enough for even the worst HDTV pack-rat. While not tool-less, all the hard disk mounts are also fitted with rubber grommets to reduce vibrations.