Lian Li PC-B12 Mid-Tower PC Chassis Review

From past experience with Lian Li chassis design I normally find that they can’t be a small nightmare to install components within, fortunately this one was a lot more straight forward as it doesn’t stray too far from your standard chassis design in terms of component installation options. I have opted to use our Cooler Master CPU cooler in favour of our Antec 920, partly because I didn’t want to remove the rear 120mm fan as they are good quality fans and I’m not sure it would do the airflow much good removing it for a radiator, that and I think the chrome finish on the new cooler fits with the chassis design rather nicely.

The big thing I wasn’t to talk about here was cable management, that large cut out at the base of the chassis gives us more room to run the cables from our PSU than near any chassis would, but it does look a bit messy. The two vertical cut outs are also rather limited in size, while they were big enough for this installation I figure things would get pretty tight if you needed to take advantage of more of the expansion ports, an optical drive, more hard drives etc.

But even with cluttered looking cable management, it’s still enough to keep cables out of the way and airflow is still pretty clear throughout the chassis, that’s all that really matters in a chassis with no window on its side panel. Total installation time was around 20mins, which is really good, especially so for a Lian Li chassis in my opinion.

As you can see there is a really good amount of breathing room in the back of the chassis, the GTX 560 Ti has lots of clearance from the PSU, ventilation on the back plate and there is a decent amount of room from the CPU cooler to the rear fan. This being quite a tall CPU cooler though we only had about 5mm from the top of it to the side panel.

Things are pretty tidy up front too, with our XPredator SSD happily mounted using the slide on system, a system that also makes for quick removal of your drives should you need to.

Around the back things are still looking neat and tidy, with our GTX 560 Ti and the Antec 620 keeping nicely with the black and chrome theme of the chassis.