Installation
Building a working PC into the PC-C36 enclosure first required removing enough internal components to facilitate motherboard installation. To provide clearance, we opted to remove the power supply, both drive cages, and the linker bar to get as much working space as possible.
First, the TFX power supply is unscrewed and removed by sliding straight out the rear of the case.
The rear PSU panel.
The HDD tray is removed with four machine screws: two in the linker bar and two on the case side.
HDD tray with visible linker bar screw.
To remove the optical drive tray, first remove a single thumb screw, then slide the unit toward the back of the case.
Optical tray with thumb screw visible.
The optical drive tray is also affixed to the case with four retainers, which allow for a secure hold with only a single thumb screw.
Sliding the drive tray backward frees it from four of these retainers.
Finally, we arrive at as spacious a base for motherboard installation as this HTPC enclosure can provide.
The bare essentials.
Once the case is stripped, the case fans become apparent. The PC-C36 sports a single 70mm slim fan on each side. There are three possible positions on each side for these fans, presumably depending on the hardware configuration inside.
Slim fans provide slim cooling.
Lian Li designed the case specifically for mATX motherboards. As such, motherboard risers are already attached to the base. The risers that Lian Li used for this application are extra high, lifting the motherboard off the bottom of the case just enough to allow for some creative cable and wire routing inside.
We appreciated these extra tall riser posts.
Installing the motherboard into the Lian Li PC-C36 MUSE demonstrates just how tightly all the components must fit to maintain a home theater friendly form factor. The remainder of the inside capacity will soon be stuffed with drive trays and power supply.
Our test motherboard fits perfectly inside the PC-C36.
One of the selling points of the PC-C36 enclosure is the ability to use a standard PCI-Express video card. For this purpose, Lian Li provides a riser card that installs into the motherboard’s PCI-Express slots and allows horizontal installation of one video card and one other expansion card. By default, Lian Li has installed a back plate with two expansion card slots arranged horizontally.
The riser card allows horizontal installation of a video card.
In our installation, the riser card proved to be a bit of trouble. Lian Li seems to have designed for a mATX motherboard with the 1x PCI-E slot to be the top slot, with the 16x slot below. Our test motherboard motherboard is configured with the 16x in the first position and the 1x in the second, so the riser card doesn’t align with the back plate. With our motherboard configuration, we were unable to install our video card because the edge of the card lined up one slot away from the case’s back plate.
This makes it possibly troublesome to use an existing hardware configuration with the case, but it becomes simply a another factor to keep in mind if designing an entire system at one time. To ensure complete compatibility with the PC-C36, a motherboard should be chosen that has the PCI-E slots in the expected order. Since Lian Li provides two back plate possibilities, the user could alternatively choose half-height riser cards, but that will severely limit video card options.
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