The Front Panel

The quality of the parts Lian Li used in this case is really impressive. The door uses a very high-end latch mechanism that allows it to be firmly closed even when you don’t lock it, which is particularly important for people that carry their computer around, because since the front door is very heavy it tends to open itself when you lift and move your case around. This simply doesn’t happen with this case.

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Figure 5: High-end latch mechanism.

On Figure 6 you can see Metal Boned K10 with its door opened. Pay attention to the thickness of the door.

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Figure 6: Case with its door opened.

As you can see on Figure 6 this case has three 5 ¼” bays and one 3 ½” external bay. You can also see the two frontal 120-mm fans in charge of cooling down the hard disk drives (this case has two washable air filters in front of them that we will talk about later). Behind the fans there are five internal 3 ½” bays that we will discuss later.

There are two important things about the door used on this case. First, you can simply remove it if you want to have a lighter case, as this door is very thick and heavy. To do that, you need to remove the two parts that hold the door by unscrewing the three screws present at each part. On Figure 7 we show the case with its door removed. Second, you can change the door configuration to make it open from left to right instead of right to left. This change, however, isn’t so fast to perform. You need to remove the door like shown on Figure 7, unscrew all six parts located on the door (hinges, latches, lock and hook), swap the parts that are on the left side with the parts that are on the right side, screw them back in place and then put the door back on the case.

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Figure 7: Case with its door removed.

All external parts of this case are manufactured in aluminum, including all bay covers.

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Figure 8: The bay covers are also manufactured in aluminum.

On Figure 9 you can see the plugs you will find on the top of the case: one eSATA port, one Firewire port, four USB 2.0 ports, mic in and headphones out. Having an eSATA port is great as more and more users are using eSATA-based external hard disk drives to backup or carry around their data. Another strong point is having four USB ports, as many cases only provide two USB ports on their frontal panel.

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Figure 9: Frontal plugs.

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