The New Case

As you can see from my PC collection, I'm a big fan of Lian-Li cases, so I was really hoping I could get the A1200 motherboard into one of these. I opted for a PC61 which is one of the few mid-tower cases I found to be deep enough to fit the motherboard in horizontally. It's the same size as some other Lian-Li models, such as the PC60 (the same case in a bare brushed aluminium finish) which currently houses my Windows machine. If you're going for a vertical motherboard installation, I'd imagine it would fit in a PC70/71/75 case (as would a small saloon car for that matter - they're huge cases) as I used for my main Linux workstation.

The PC61 case

The PC60 case

Fitting the motherboard in is one thing, but if you also have an accelerator card or other add-ons, you need to make sure this will fit too. Many cards stick out a good 2 or 3cm past the end of most revision 1 motherboards (other revisions of the motherboard are either shorter or have a removable mouse port section, but the total length including add-on card will be the same). If using a PC6x case, you may need to remove one of the front fans to get it all to fit in.

I had to ditch the extra hard drive cage in the bottom of the PC61, so I removed the rails which hold it in place too by drilling out the four rivets holding it in place. This still leaves us a couple of 3.5" bays where the floppy drive fits. These are thankfully still usable as they're located on the opposite side of the case to the motherboard tray. I also removed the speaker, releasing its pins from the cable connector by pushing them in with a pair of long-nosed pliers.

These four rivets were drilled out

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