Lian Li LANCOOL III Review – The Best Case of 2022?
Cooling Performance
Thermal performance is an essential factor for any PC case. Your system may look fantastic and seem silent from the outside, but all of that is for nought if your PC has the internal temperature of an oven. Your PC case needs enough airflow for your components to remain cool under load and to prevent any form of thermal throttling. For our test, we used the following hardware using fixed fan speeds (so that only the case and its included fans can influence thermal performance).
ASUS TUF Gaming GT501
Intel i9-9700K @4.8GHz at 1.2V
ASUS ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming @ 100% Current Capacity/ LL lvl16
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition @ 9V via Fan Speed Reducer
Nvidia GTX 980 Reference @ 60% Fixed Fan Speed
Corsair LP Vengiance LP (Grey) @ 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2 NVMe SSD
Corsair RM550X Power Supply
The graph below showcases Delta temperatures with a controlled ambient temperature of 20 degrees Celsius.
1000 RPM Fan Tests
Sadly, our standard 600 RPM stress test did not work with the LANCOOL III, because our normal fan control software would not run this case’s fans at a steady 600 RPM, invalidating the test. Thankfully, things worked as normal at 1,000 RPM and at this case’s maximum fan RPMs (1650 RPM), allowing our other standard tests to proceed normally.
At 1000 RPM, the LANCOOL III remained quiet and delivered thermal results that are towards the bottom of our graphics. That’s a good thing, as the lower on these graphs a case is, the lower its delta thermals are. While this case does not deliver the best thermals that we have ever seen, these remain respectable results, specially for a case that has plenty of space for SSDs and HDDs.
Max RPM Fan Tests
When we let the Lancool III’s fans run at their highest RPMs, the case falls towards the bottom levels of our CPU and GPU performance charts. That means that this case’s CPU and GPU thermals are amongst the best that we have seen for an out-of-the box case. Only the Fractal Torrent delivers a convincing lead over the Lancool III, and it ships with more fans and has less space for HDDs/SSDs.
