Lian Lee Lancool 207 reviews

A company that makes trend-setting niche PC cases – from compact gaming cases to giant glass-sided cubes – Lian Li has, now and then, revisited the traditional mid-tower market using its Lancool sub-brand. It maintains its presence in the mainstream market as other design fads wax and wane. And this form factor remains popular with gamers, despite attempts by Lian Li and others to market the compact chassis design to the same PC makers. With the $79.99 Lancool 207, Lian Lee doesn’t reinvent the wheel but delivers a very good value for money chassis, equipped with an unusually located and oriented PSU mount and two large, bright fans. It’s a fine value among ATX chassis, up there with recent budget efforts from Montec, Thermalec and others.

Design: Can be as mid-tower as mid-tower

Our Lancool 207 sample is the black version of Lian Li; The company offers a white version for $5 more. The Lancool 207’s 18-inch height sits squarely in the middle of the mid-tower format’s traditional 17-to-19-inch size, seemingly ignoring the top-panel-radiator argument that has pushed many competing designs to size. Before we get into Lian Li’s method, it’s nice for us to take a moment to appreciate how large and commanding a pair of 140mm intake fans look when mounted in front of a true mid-tower.

Found along the upper surface of the front-panel, the Lancool 207’s ports include one Gen 2×2 Type-C, two USB 3.x Type-A, and a headset (headphone/mic combo) jack. There’s also a non-lit power button in the middle of this section, and a small finger hold in front of it to help you remove the mesh insert on the front panel more easily.

Covering its power supply air inlet, the Lancool 207’s only dust filter slides out from under the lower edge of its front panel.

On the back, we find our first indication of how Lian Lee was able to fit top-panel radiator space into the 18-inch-tall case: the entire motherboard section has been moved 7/8 of an inch below where the power supply would normally be found, and Where we’d normally expect to find the power-supply bay, we see nothing but a vent panel and power cord receptacle.

An inset I/O tray features seven expansion-slot covers, a 120mm fan mount with vertical adjustment slots instead of fixed-position mounting holes, and a finger grip behind the snap-off top panel to make it visible. Easy to pull upwards from the rest of the case.

We noted that the mesh section of the front panel comes off. So do all the other mesh panels, the bottom left panel only uses screws (which can be seen in the picture above) to hold it in place. The plastic part of the front panel also moves away from the 207’s steel structure but is connected to that structure via its front panel port cable. Since the two factory-fitted 140mm ARGB intake fans fit through a cutout in that panel, there’s nothing to see behind the face.

The top-panel fan mounts are too small to hold three 140mm fans, though two can be mounted as close to the front or back as you like. There is enough space for three 120mm fans with radiators up to 412mm in length. And while the thin 48mm distance between the top panel and the motherboard may seem completely inadequate for mounting a typical radiator/fan combo (54mm), the 120mm mounts are offset horizontally by 54mm from the motherboard’s standoff. So you’ve got a fair bit of left/right clearance here.

On the other hand, if you want to put a 280mm radiator up front, you’ll likely find that its endcap doesn’t clear the power-supply bay below. That’s right—the power-supply bay is mounted on the front crossway and about 3/8 inch below the bottom edge of the front lower fan. Leanne Lee says that crossway placement limits the power supply’s maximum depth to 160mm, although we tested it with a 170mm-deep unit after measuring a total of 180mm of space. Depending on how your cables exit the power supply’s casing, your results may vary.

Also visible in the image below are the power-supply extension cable, a pair of 120mm internal fans on the back of the case, and a vertically adjustable graphics-card support on the front of the case.

Note that the top of the power-supply bay is set inward to provide extra space for tucking in power cables. That internal step is only 9.8 inches from the I/O panel, so the Lancool 207 doesn’t really have room for a motherboard larger than the 9.6-inch ATX standard.

Below the front bay of the power supply bay are two drive trays, each with spaced square mounting holes suitable for both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. The parts you need to fit the small round screws into those large square holes are found inside the accessory kit, which is zip-tied to the top of the rear drive tray by the factory.

Keeping in mind all the limitations we mentioned earlier, the space to mount a 12-by-9.6-inch ATX motherboard is roughly boxed by the Lancool 207’s cable guide, power-supply bay, and lower fan tray.

Building with Lancool 207

The Lancool 207’s parts box includes at least nine M3 screws to match the motherboard standoffs, four power-supply screws, 12 rubber dampers for mounting the hard drive, eight M3 and 12 #6-32 shoulder screws for installing the drive on those rubber dampers, three additional motherboard standoff, a Phillips #2-to-standoff adapter socket, and 16 fan screws with plastic-attractive threads. You’ll also find metal snaps on the outer panel, four zip-style cable ties, two Velcro cable straps, and four additional plastic clasps to add even a block of foam to support the front end of long graphics cards when mounted in the Lean-Lee optional (not included) vertical. -Mount graphics-card stand.

Cables include an Intel-style 9-pin combo connector for a power button lead, HD Audio for the front panel headset jack, ARGB and PWM for the illuminated front fans, a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 cable for the Type-C front panel port, and two USB 3. .x A 19-pin dual port lead for the Type-A port. Also included but not shown is a PWM fan lead that splits to feed two 120mm intake fans located on the bottom of the motherboard.

Of course, our 240mm closed-loop cooler fans hang below the top of the motherboard, but that’s why the roughly 2-inch horizontal offset was so important. As for the 207’s graphics-card support bracket, we had to move it forward a slot to reach our 12-inch-tall GeForce RTX 4070 Ti’s cooler.

Having worked with oversized cases for years, I initially found it hard to believe that a mid-tower could look so small. It still looks good!

Test results

Here’s a quick overview of the standard test parts we now use for ATX case testing…

The Lancool 207 surprised us with the lowest overall CPU temperature and the second-lowest voltage-regulator temperature, but the second-highest GPU temperature among the six cases tested. It’s not that the GPU temperature was bad, but we expected the lead through the two intake fans upwards towards our card. Perhaps they are turning up the heat on the power supply?

Whatever the cause of the unexpected thermal results, the Lancool 207’s good overall performance and lack of any real drawbacks let us move on to the noise test, where we expected the additional two 1,900rpm center fans to trouble it. That didn’t happen. It has the fourth-quietest (or third-noisiest, depending on how you look at it) test results from the left-hand corner and the third-quietest (or fourth-loudest) from the right test corner. In other words, it’s right in the middle.

Verdict: The PSU is angled, but the actual angle is standard

The odd front placement and rotation of the power supply doesn’t seem to give the Lancool 207 any distinct performance advantages, nor is it a drawback, other than not being able to fit a much taller power supply than the 170mm-deep unit we used. Today’s assessment. For most manufacturers, fairly loose power supply constraints are unlikely to cause any inconvenience.

Aside from the unusual PSU situation, this is a solid-value case that Leanne Li loyalists will be thrilled with for the price. The company has done a great job with value chassis of late, winning the Editors’ Choice Lian Li Dan A3-MATX earlier this year. This model is just shy of Editors’ Choice (Montech’s Air 903 Base takes the crown for budget ATX tower), but if you want a better look, we’d put this model up against it. We are just ourselves.

About Thomas Soderstrom

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A few years ago, when a small website called for product-review editors. I jumped at the chance: I had just finished a four-year stint as a systems supplier. That experience provided the credentials I needed to transition from industry supplier to industry observer. For one thing, I was the first source to publish the capacitor plague (“got juice”) on EDN.

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