Lian Li PC TU-200 The HTPC Build (Introduction)

Inspiration

The reason I decided to make this build in the first place is because my father in law needed an everyday use PC and I wanted to build this little guy as a surprise for his birthday.  He also likes to watch movies so I started out with a home theater PC ("HTPC") in mind.  His everyday usage mainly consists of Excel and Word; occasionally he may use it for Photoshop but that's quite rare.  My father in law loves novelty items and he has mentioned on quite a few occasions that he wants a cool looking PC with LED lights inside.  I intend to fulfill that wish with this build.

The reason I chose the Lian Li PC TU-200 is for three reasons:

1) The case is extremely small but still capable of hosting some serious hardware as it can take an ATX power supply as well as a full size graphics card.  This is quite rare on for mini-ITX cases, at least to my knowledge.

2) This case looks awesome.  Look at it.  The overall design is sleek and clean.  There is some added flair with the screws at the edges, giving it a modern industrial feel.  The handle on top to fully take advantage of the small form factor is just a cherry on top.

3) This case is very well-made (though there are a few flaws that will be covered later).  It's constructed with aluminum and the craftsmanship is amazing.

Overall Assessment of Build Difficulty: Difficult.  Due to the small (very small) form factor as well as some of the case design decisions, this is a case that requires lots of patience and experience.

Planning

Since the case has been chosen, I decided to do some further research and find out just what's needed to get a system up and running inside this little guy.

Side note: I will make side notes throughout this article and point out the little things that I think are important.  In this instance, I want to emphasize that research is absolutely imperative to any PC builder.  No one wants to spend over $800 and come home with parts that do not fit together.

My research first focused on form factor.  I want to find out whether there are any peculiarities when it comes to the parts that might fit in this PC.  It turns out that the case does fit an ATX power supply, HOWEVER, if the case is left unmodified and the hard drive bay is kept inside, one should consider using a 140mm long ATX power supply. Any longer and you will risk mashing the cables from the power supply against the drive bay.  See picture below for details and note that the red box depicts roughly how a power supply would fit.

This case needs a 140mm ATX power supply.

Next I know that I need a mini-ITX motherboard ("mobo").  One thing worth noting here is that I worried a mini-ITX motherboard may have a limited selection of CPUs.  So I wanted to find out what type of sockets are on these types of mobo.  It turns out the AMD mini-ITX mobo have FM1 sockets (Ex: a CPU for FM1 type socket would be AMD A6-3670K) and AM3/AM2+/AM2 sockets (Ex: these sockets fit Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs).  The Intel mini-ITX mobo can have LGA1155 socket types which can fit Core i7 to i3 type CPUs.  These are the latest and the greatest CPUs on the market so I guess my worries were unwarranted.

I wasn't planning on inserting a powerful graphics card into the computer since it won't be used for gaming and the rare usage of Photoshop would not warrant a powerful discrete graphics card.  As a result I did no further research on how well graphics cards fit into this case.

My father in law did want some LEDs inside so I thought a red LED front case fan should contrast nicely with the black.  I did some research but did find any information on whether the front 140mm front fan is (easily) removable.  So I emailed some editors from a few online publications and found out that it is indeed removable.  Great!  See picture here for a full frontal view of the case.

This roughly concludes my initial research.  Now onto the rest of the parts.


Motherboard and CPU

Given the needs of this computer, I know I potentially wanted an integrated video card on the mobo.  However, it turns out all the mobos I like come without an integrated video card.  Luckily, AMD came out with the AMD A8-3870K that's got a quad core CPU along with an AMD Radeon HD 6550D that comes all in the size of a normal CPU.

Power Supply

It was difficult finding a 140mm long power supply.  I finally spotted the Corsair PC Builder series that's just 140mm long.  In the end I decided to go with the 500 watt or the CX500 model.  This is more than sufficient for my needs and if I ever decide to stick a discrete video card inside this case, I think the 500 watt model would be able to handle it as well as there are two PCI-Express connectors.

Hard Drive and Memory

Boot time and overall speed is pretty important so I wanted to invest in a solid state drive ("SSD").  In order to have enough storage space, I bought a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB drive.  With memory or RAM, I decided to go with 8 GB.

The Rest of It

Since I expect this PC to be carried around a bit, I wanted to give it some wireless capabilities.  So I went with a Rosewill RNX-N150 wireless card.  As mentioned before, I wanted to swap out the front case fan for a LED fan.  I settled on the XIGMATEK 140mm red LED fan.  Reviews seem to indicate that it's of solid build and relatively quiet.  Which are both important factors.  In order to make this a all-around HTPC, I decided to invest in a Blu-Ray drive.  And the chosen one is Finally, since the case is so small, I decided to stick an extra PCI slot fan to increase airflow and ensure temperature control inside the case.  For that I decided on the AOC FC-2000 case cooler.  It's also reported to be relatively quiet and can move large amounts of air out the case.

Complete Parts List

Case - Lian Li PC TU-200

CPU - AMD A8-3870K

Mobo - ASRock A75M-ITX

Memory - Kingston XMP 8GB

Primary Hard Drive (OS) - AData XPG SX900 128 GB

Secondary Hard Drive (Storage) - Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB

Power Supply - Corsair CX500

Case Fan - Xigmatek Crystal Series CLF-F1452

PCI Slot Fan - AOC FC-2000

Wireless Card - Rosewill RNX-150PCe

Optical Drive - LITE-ON Blu-Ray

Stay tuned for the next part on the actual construction of the system