If there's one thing Lian-Li is good at, it's making very pretty cases entirely out of aluminum. The company's latest number is no exception, although we don't entirely see why a NAS enclosure has to look so good. Despite the lavish form, the PC-Q26 also has function to back it up, so it's not a case of form over function.
Inside the PC-Q26 there is room for a single Mini-ITX motherboard and graphics cards up to 19 cm long. Hopefully, you don't intend on mounting a graphics card in this case, though, as it has a total of ten 3.5" bays along with a single 2.5" slot. That matters because Mini-ITX motherboards (with just a small handful of exceptions) at best have six SATA slots, meaning you'll need a RAID or SATA card in order to be able to utilize this case to its fullest potential. To power the lot, you can use a standard ATX PSU that's up to 190 mm long.
Included with the case is a single hot-swap plate, which is mounted behind the top two 3.5" mounts; more hot swap plates can be easily added.
Lian-Li hasn't skimped on cooling options, either. The front of the case has a total of three 120 mm fans and the top has another acting as exhaust. If that's not enough, you can add another 120 mm fan on the side panel along with an 80 mm fan as rear exhaust, too. All the fan intakes are also covered with dust filters, so despite the fact that you'll probably leave your NAS running 24/7, it won't fill up with dust too fast.
It's clear that this case is for the enthusiast storage-happy home server builder, who keeps it in the same room as his main PC. It's built primarily for storing lots of hard drives, it looks good (although your taste might differ, we can surely agree that the looks are home office-worthy), and it has enough fan mounts to make a silent build. True, hard drives make noise as well, but modern-day hard drives aren't nearly as loud as they used to be, and you can set them to spin down when not in use anyway.
The Lian-Li PC-Q26 will cost $189 and should be available on Newegg.com by the end of October.
Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
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