Final Thoughts on the Lian Li SUP-01 Case
The Lian Li SUP-01 is definitely an interesting case. The internal design is nothing that I’ve seen before with the graphics card being mounted in the front of the case. This design choice is quite interesting as it allows the case to be shorter, but also not as wide. The graphics card mount will support 4 slot cards too, which is pretty impressive. The graphics card actually acts as an intake for the system and with the three included cooling fans temperatures of our mid-range system were quite good. I am not sure how well this system would do with something like an RTX 4090 and a Core i9-14900K. You do have the optional rear bracket that allows you to install a 120mm fan outside of the rear of the case if you wanted a bit better cooling. Talking about cooling I was surprised to see that this case supports a 360mm AiO. You are going to want to make sure the one you choose has connections on the radiator that can swivel. Lian Li’s Galahad II series does, which is why it works in this case.
Building in this case is quite easy too and everything is easily accessible. The removable cooling brackets make it so you can install something like an AiO outside of the case. The RGB lighting on the case is quite nice too and I really like that they did add lighting on the PCIe 4.0 riser card. The way the lighting sort of illuminates the frame of the side panel is really cool and it was nice to see a built-in controller for the lighting with more effects than just rainbow wave.
But the more I looked at the case, I wondered would I actually want this as my main system? Looking at the case from the side it does not look at that great in my opinion. You really can’t see the backplate of your graphics card, the GPU bracket just looks messy, there is quite a lot of room between the bottom of the motherboard and the bottom of the case, and since we’ve moved the graphics card there is quite a lot of empty space below the PCIe riser card. Maybe if you mounted some type of screen under the riser card it might look better. I also really don’t see the point of the mirror, anything it adds to the case is taken away by the bottom of the GPU bracket that just sticks up from the bottom compartment of the case. And when we buy a graphics card we really want to show it off and here it is sort of hidden in the front of the case.
And maybe this case design allows for full-size components in a somewhat smaller chassis, but I would rather something like Lian Li’s own O11 Dynamic Mini. This is actually what I used on my main system and it supports more cooling and looks better in my opinion. Your only real sacrifice there is having to use a SFX power supply. And that’s not to say I don’t like this case, but I think the design is a bit messy and things could have been done to clean up the empty sections of the case.
Lian Li will be selling this case for $149.99. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Lian Li SUP-01 Case an 8 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Unique internal design
– Support for 4-slot graphics cards
– Cool RGB lighting
– Good cooling with a 360mm AiO
– All tool-less side panels
– Easy installation
Cons:
– Sort of a messy interior
– Hides your graphics card in the front of the case
– AiO installation could be tricky without a Lian Li AiO
