Lian Li Alpha 550 RGB Tempered Glass Chassis Review

Peter Donnell / 7 years ago

Final Thoughts

Price

The Lian Li Alpha 550 is available now from most major retailers. It’s available in both black and white variants, each with the RGB fans and four tempered glass panels. The price does seem to be all over the place though, with Amazon listing it at £195, although some Google-Fu may find it for its intended £150.

Overview

The typical price for a Lian Li chassis is usually pretty high, but you get what you pay for in regards to build quality and engineering. Sure, they’ve dropped the aluminium in favour of steel here, but it’s worked extremely well. There’s a huge amount of tempered glass here too, more so than most other chassis. That does go a long way to explaining the price tag. However, when you factor in the four fans, three of which are RGB, as well as the hub/controller, the price starts looking a lot more competitive.

Cooling

Having three high-quality fans pulling a huge wall of air in from the front of the chassis is awesome. Right out of the box, the chassis delivers great airflow for any system build. Plus, the rear exhaust fan may not look fancy, but it is equally good quality to the others. Four fans of this calibre wouldn’t come cheap on their own.

If you strip out all the fans, you’ve got the room for plenty of custom loop radiators, 120/140mm fans, and room to spare too. Either way, you’ll be happy with what it has to offer.

Storage

With no HDD bays up front, the 550 still does a great job of giving you lots of storage mounts. The removable 3.5″ tray under the PSU shroud hides those ugly HDDs. However, SSDs can mount on the dedicated brackets, where they’ll be on show through the right side panel window.

Cable Routing

There are plenty of rubber grommets, a metal cover for the big cables, a PSU shroud, and cable tie loops everywhere. Even a first-time system builder should have an easy job of getting a neat finished product. While the pros of neat cable routing can be debated regarding airflow, this chassis has a lot of windows. Scruffy cables are going to stick out like a sore thumb, so it’s good to see a lot of thought has gone into the design here.

Should I Buy One?

Make no mistake, this is one of the nicest looking and best laid out chassis we’ve reviewed in a while. It may even be my favourite Lian-Li chassis for a long time too. It’s priced very competitively too and holds up well against its main rival, the Corsair 570X. Personally, I love the black model we reviewed, but I’ll be damned if the white version doesn’t look even better!