Lian Li Pitstop T60 DIY Test Bench Review

Assembly and Installation – Part 2

The next step in our installation and assembly includes securing the motherboard tray to the side panels using four thumb screws.

We installed the motherboard standoffs using this handy tool shown above. I usually use a nut driver, but wanted to try this device to see how it worked. It initially worked very well, but started to wear down and spin after only the fourth standoff. Wish it was made from the same alloy that they used for the chassis parts.

Here is the finalized motherboard tray with black standoffs installed. It’s started to look like a real test bench.

This PCI slot bracket attaches to the motherboard tray with two screws. Each slot has vents, which are not necessarily needed with an open-air case. They also added black thumb screws for each PCI slot.

Next, we installed the motherboard, CPU, heatsink, memory, and video card. We also routed all the power and data cables as well as connected the front panel power and reset button jumpers. Looks pretty clean to me.

The final part of our installation was to put together the top case handle. This handle is shaped like a long triangle and takes six screws to make the bar you see above.

The handle attaches to the side panels with four thumb screws. Lian Li added their company logo to the front of the bar to complete the unique design of the T60.

After only 40 minutes we were able to completely assemble the T60 as well as install a micro ATX computer system with air-cooled heatsink. There are a lot of things I like about this test bench now that it is assembled, but there are a few mis-steps I need to point out. While I like how the power supply and hard drive cage are layed out, I would have preferred the PSU to point to the back of the chassis instead of the front to ensure all the necessary cables route to the back instead of the front of the test bench. As you can see from the photo, I would have also preferred better cable routing options for the data cables. I had to route the hard drive SATA cable through the second optical drive bay in order for it to connect properly to the motherboard.

Here is the back panel of the T60 test bench. They should have added some cable management features to the back of the chassis because they had plenty of room under the motherboard to work with. They had a neat cable management clamp on the previous Lian Li PC-T1R “Spider” case that might have worked well on this chassis as well.

Here is a photo of the right side of the T60 test bench. You can see how I routed the power cables to the motherboard around the side of the motherboard tray. After reviewing the side panel, it looks like Lian Li wanted me to use the slots in the side panel to route these cables instead. I’ll have to keep that in mind when I swap out hardware next time.

Here is the left side of the T60 to complete the 360-view of the test bench. You can see how I routed the data cables and power and reset button wires in this photo. I should have routed these cables through the open slots in the side panel to help use every feature allocated to me with the T60.

Another fairly major flaw in the T60 design is the height of the top handle. The handle BARELY fits over our Zalman CNPS10X Flex heatsink. This is important to take notice of because most high end, air-cooled heatsinks are around this height or taller. Consumers should be aware of this issue in case they want to use high performance heatsinks with this case.