The chassis isn’t really built for such large intake fans and to some extent they’re wasted, but they still do a good enough job to put the 215 near the top of our cooling charts on a regular basis, and performance was especially good in our noise-normalized thermal test. To achieve that, the 215 comes with two 200mm ARGB front fans, a 120mm rear exhaust fan, and a wide-open mesh front panel. Lian Li partnered with another company to produce the ultra-budget steel-and-glass case with the express goal of getting the best possible airflow at the lowest possible price. The 215 diverges from Lian Li’s traditionally high-end aluminum enclosures, and instead is closer to its recent Lancool II and Lancool II Mesh designs (as the name implies). Lian Li positioned the Lancool 215 as its “P400A Killer.” We may not entirely agree with that-the P400A Digital is still a great case at $90-but the P400A won this award last year, got another mention in our mid-year case round-up this year, and now it goes to the 215. We’re giving this to the Lian Li 215, which we were neutral to positive about at launch, but which has proven itself worthy as the rest of the cases came out for the year. The first award is for Best Overall, which factors price, mechanical design, thermals, acoustics, and build quality into the consideration - but especially price-to-performance.

The target audience for this piece is either people returning to PC building for the first time in a while - those who might be out of the loop - or people who haven’t had time to watch or read every single one of our case reviews over the past year. We’ll embed a few charts occasionally, but to get the full charts, you’ll want to check the individual case reviews for each enclosure. This does not influence our decision to choose one case over another - we’re choosing based on our empirical testing data from the last year or so. We often earn a commission from the retailer (not from the manufacturer and not from your purchase) if you click on the links. We’ll talk about some of those, too, like the Phanteks P400A.Įach case will be accompanied with a link to our review and to the product listings. This coverage provides a flyby overview of the best cases we’ve reviewed or worked on in the past year, but keep in mind that cases don’t age like CPUs or GPUs - many good cases from 2019 are still available, and in some instances, the pricing has improved. We’ve already published a buyer’s guide for the Best CPUs of 2020 (for gaming, workstation tasks, video editing, and more), and now we’re back with the Best & Worst PC Cases of 2020. We’re back for our annual “Best Of” series.

Pure pc gaming.enjin